October 19^th is

Evaluate Your Life Day

Seafood Bisque Day

LGBT Center Awareness Day *

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MORE! Emma Bell Miles, Max Planck and Marguerite Perey, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Albania – Mother Teresa Day

Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal –
Durga Puja/Dassain/Bijoya Dashimi/Vijaya Dashami
(Hindu Goddess Durga festival)

Mozambique – Samora Machel Day
(first President of Mozambique)

New Zealand – Hawke’s Bay:
Provincial Anniversary Day

Niue – Constitution Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

202 BC – Battle of Zama: Scipio Africanus leads a Roman army supported by Numidian cavalry under Masinissa to a decisive victory over the Carthaginians under Hannibal Barca, ending the Second Punic war after 17 years

1469 – The marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile begins the unification of Spain

1512 – Martin Luther becomes a doctor of theology

1596 – The Spanish galleon San Felipe, enroute to Mexico from the Philippines, is shipwrecked on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and the local daimyō seizes its rich cargo. Spanish protests reach Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the ruling taikō of Japan. An unfortunate reference by the ship’s pilot to Spanish missionaries using shipwreck as an cover for infiltrating a country, opening the way for military conquest, results in the crucifixion of 26 Christians in Nagasaki, Japan’s first lethal persecution of Christians

1605 – Sir Thomas Browne born, English polymath and author; best known for his book of reflections, Religio Medici

1765 – The Stamp Act Congress draws up resolutions addressed to King George III, acknowledging his sovereignty, but claiming full rights and liberties as subject of Great Britain, including the right to be taxed, only by their consent, and only by the colonial legislatures which represent them

1781 – Representatives of British General Lord Cornwallis surrender his sword to American General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia

1784 – Leigh Hunt born, English poet and critic

1789 – John Jay is sworn in as the first Chief Justice of the United States

1812 – Napoleon’s army begins the retreat from Moscow

1850 – Annie Smith Peck born, American mountaineer, teacher, linguist, feminist, author and lecturer; first woman student at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; taught archaeology and Latin at Purdue University and Smith College; her tunic and trousers worn with boots when she climbed the Matterhorn in 1895 caused a serious hullaballoo in the press, and prompted public debate on what women can and should do; first woman to climb Huascarán in Peru (22,204 feet/6768 meters) when she was 57 years old, then climbed Coropuna (20,922 feet/6.377 meters) in 1911 and planted a “Votes for Women” banner at the summit; continued to climb mountains until she was 82 years old

1856 – Edmund Beecher Wilson born, American zoologist and geneticist, author of The Cell, a notable textbook, he and Nettie Maria Stevens, working independently, both discovered the chromosomal basis of sex

1858 – George A. Boulenger born in Belgium, zoologist in Britain who described and gave scientific names to over 2,000 animal species, mostly fish, reptiles and amphibians; as a botanist, he devoted much study to roses

1859 – Alfred Dreyfus born, French Jewish army officer wrongfully tried and convicted of treason, his uniform publicly stripped of all insignia, and his sword broken; after serving four years of a life sentence in the infamous Devil’s Island prison, he is re-tried, found guilty again in spite of evidence that he is innocent, but is offered a pardon because of public outcry – especially the tireless advocacy of Dreyfus by author Émile Zola. Dreyfus accepts the pardon rather than returning to Devil’s Island, but is held under house arrest for two more years, until finally exonerated by a military commission; readmitted to the army, promoted to Major

1862 – Auguste Lumière born, pioneering French cinema director-producer

1864 –The American Civil War’s northernmost land action is a raid from Canada by 21 Confederate soldiers on St. Albans, Vermont, to rob banks, and trick the Union Army into diverting troops to defend the Canadian border. When several villagers resist, one is killed and two are wounded. The raiders retreat to Canada with over $200,000 taken from the city’s three banks. Under U.S. government pressure, Canada arrests the raiders, returns $88,000 of recovered money to St. Albans, but refuses to extradite the raiders on the grounds that they are soldiers under orders in time of war, and releases them. This makes many Canadians turn against the Confederacy, feeling Canada is being drawn into the conflict in spite of its declared neutrality, so Confederates never launch a raid from Canada again

1868 – Bertha Knight Landes born, president of the Washington State chapter of the League of Women Voters; Seattle city councilwoman 1922-1924, and first female mayor of a major American city, Seattle, 1926-1928; her mayoral campaign motto was “municipal housekeeping,” and during her tenure as mayor, she tightened the budget, raised standards, and pushed hard to clean up city hall, bold reforms in a time of widespread corruption in Seattle

1879 – Emma Bell Miles born, American writer, poet, and artist; she published The Spirit of the Mountains in 1905, which contained stories, travel narratives, entries from her journals, and cultural analysis of Southern Appalachia; the section of her book on Appalachian music first appeared as an article in Harper’s Monthly in 1904, probably the first mention of Appalachian music in a popular magazine; several of her journals have also appeared in print

Bookcover – Emma Bell Miles working on a painting –
her painting of a hummingbird

1882 – Umberto Boccioni born, influential Italian painter and sculptor

1899 – Miguel Ángel Asturias born, Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright and diplomat; noted for El Señor Presidente, and Men of Maize; awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature

1900 – Max Planck, German theoretical physicist, while working on creating lightbulbs to produce maximum light with minimum energy, formulates the Planck black-body radiation law, to describe the amount of energy given off by an ‘ideal’ physical body, which absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, no matter what the frequency or angle of incidence

1901 – Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont wins the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize with a flight that rounds the Eiffel Tower

1908 – Geirr Tveitt born, Norwegian composer and pianist

1909 – Marguerite Perey born, French physicist, a student of Marie Curie, who discovered the element francium; in 1962, she became the first woman elected to the French Académie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor

1910 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar born, Indian astrophysicist, shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler

1912 – After the Treaty of Lausanne, Italy takes possession of Tripoli, Libya, from the Ottoman Empire

1917 – Dallas Love Field TX is named by the U.S. Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps after Moss L. Love, who was killed during a training flight in 1913

1917 – Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande born, Indian mathematician noted for work in combinational mathematics and statistical designs; the Shrikhande graph is named for him; fellow of the Indian National Science Academy

1923 – Ruth Carter Stevenson born, American art patron and collector; founder of the Amon Carter Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas, noted for its collection of American Western Art; she was the first woman appointed to the board of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and its first woman chair

1926 – Marjorie Tallchief born, member of the Osage nation and prima ballerina, the first Native American to be named première danseuse étoile in the Paris Opera Ballet; younger sister of Maria Tallchief

Marjorie Tallchief and Erik Bruhn in Don Quixote

1930 – Mavis M. Nicholson born in Wales, British writer and radio-TV broadcaster; started with Thames Television hosting one of their first daytime television programmes; was a presenter on Tea Break, Good Afternoon, After Noon and Mavis on 4, from the 1970s to the 1990s

1931 – John le Carré born, English intelligence officer and author of highly successful espionage novels

1935 – The League of Nations places economic sanctions on fascist Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia

1943 – Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, is isolated by researchers at Rutgers University

1945 – Patricia Ireland born, American lawyer, administrator and feminist activist; president of the National Organization for Women (1991-2001); when she worked as a flight attendant for Pan Am, Ireland discovered gender-based discrepancies in the treatment of insurance coverage for spouses of employees, brought a formal complaint and fought for a change in coverage. After the U.S. Department of Labor ruled in her favor, she began law school and performing volunteer work for the National Organization for Women. She advocated extensively for the rights of poor women, gays and  lesbians, and African-American women. She has campaigned for electing female candidates, and trained people to defend clinics from anti-choice protesters around the United States; author of What Women Want

1950 – Iran is the first country to accept technical assistance from the United States under the Point Four Program, the fourth foreign policy objective made by Harry Truman in his inaugural address in January 1949 – winning developing countries to the U.S. side in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. by sharing with them expertise in agriculture, industry and healthcare

1954 – Great Britain and Egypt sign the Suez Canal Agreement; Britain’s troops would be withdrawn from the region in exchange for the canal remaining as a British base. But the agreement was short-lived. Britain’s close ties with Iraq and Jordan increasingly became an issue for Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and tensions in the Middle East escalated, setting off the 1956 Suez Crisis

1954 – Deborah Blum born, American journalist, science writer and director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York and The Poison Squad; she wrote a series of articles for the Sacramento Bee called “The Monkey Wars” which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting

1958 – Carolyn Browne born, British diplomat, British Ambassador to Kazakhstan (2013-2018); Ambassador to Azerbaijan (2007-2011); one of the Permanent Representatives of the United Kingdom to the European Union (2002-2005)

1960 – Susan Straight born, American author, essayist and short story writer; 2007 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction; 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award for her short story “The Golden Gopher”

1960 – U.S. imposes a drastic trade embargo against Cuba, not lifted until 2015

1962 –Tracy Chevalier born in America, American-British historical novelist, best known for Girl with a Pearl Earring

1967 – Amy Carter born, American human rights and diplomatic solutions activist; daughter of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter

1967 – Smokey Robinson and the Miracles release “I Second That Emotion”

1973 – President Richard Nixon rejects an Appeals Court decision that he must turn over the Watergate tapes

1974 – Niue becomes a self-governing colony of New Zealand

1977 – The apartheid government of South Africa declared 19 organisations unlawful, and dozens of leading South Africans, including Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Dispatch Donald Woods were placed under restriction. The World and Weekend World newspapers were shut down, and the Black People’s Convention (BPC), the South African Student’s Organisation (SASO), the Black Parent’s Association (BPA), the Black Women’s Federation and the Union of Black Journalists were all banned. Eight members of the Soweto ‘Committee of Ten’ were arrested

1983 – Cara Santa Maria born, American science writer, producer, television host and podcaster; science correspondent for the Huffington Post

2003 – Mother Teresa is beatified by Pope John Paul II

2004 – CenterLink, originally founded in 1994 as the National Association of LGBT Community Centers, opens a national office in Washington DC to provide ongoing support and technical assistance to LGBT community centers across the U.S. LGBT Center Awareness Day * is started to increase visibility of LGBT community centers as places for members of the community to access life-saving health services and identity affirming programs

2005 – Saddam Hussein goes on trial in Baghdad for crimes against humanity

2011 – When more painful austerity measures are announced by the Greek government, hundreds of youths smash and looting stores in central Athens, clashing with police, during a massive anti-austerity protest

2014 – Scientists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center report in Nature Medicine success in using human pluripotent stem cells (which can become any cell type in the body) to grow human intestinal tissues with functioning nerves in a laboratory; enabling them to study intestinal disorders in functioning, three-dimensional human organ tissue, and test new therapeutics before clinical trials in patients

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