October 21^th is

Apple Day *

Babbling Day

Back to the Future Day *

Count Your Buttons Day

Celebration of the Mind Day *

Pumpkin Cheesecake Day

Reptile Awareness Day

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MORE! Alfred Nobel, Ursula K. Le Guin and Derek Bell, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

British Virgin Islands – St. Ursula Day

Burundi – President Ndadaye’s
Death Anniversary

Egypt – Egyptian Naval Day

Honduras – Army Day

Serbia –
WWII Victims Remembrance Day

Taiwan – Overseas Chinese Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1097 – First Crusade: The Siege of Antioch is begun by Crusaders from the Byzantine Empire against the Muslim-held city under Governor Yaghi-Siyan

1328 – Zhu Yuanzhang born, who will be the Hongwu Emperor, the founder and first ruler of China’s Ming dynasty (1368-1644)

1392 – Emperor Go-Kameyama, the last Japanese emperor from the Southern Court, abdicates by handing over the three sacred treasures to his Northern Court rival, Emperor Go-Komatsu

1512 – Martin Luther joins the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg

1520 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at the straits now named for him, the Straits of Magellan, a route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, separating the southern tip of mainland South America from Tierra del Fuego

1600 – Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats rivals at the Battle of Sekighara, beginning the Tokugawa shogunate, which will control Japan until 1867

1687 – Nicolaus Bernoulli born, Swiss mathematician; worked on probability theory in law, differential equations and geometry

1772 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge born, English poet and philosopher

1774 – First display of the word “Liberty” on a flag, raised by American colonists in Taunton MA in defiance of British rule

1775 – Giuseppe Baini born, Italian composer, critic and priest

1797 – U.S. Navy frigate Constitution is launched in Boston Harbor

1805 – At the Battle of Trafalgar, the British fleet led by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet, ending French maritime power and making Britain the dominant naval power until the 20^th century, but Admiral Horatio Nelson is killed

1808 – Samuel F. Smith born, American Baptist minister and hymn writer; “America” aka “My  Country ‘Tis of Thee”

1816 – Rev. Robert Sparke Hutchings founds the Penang Free School, the first and now oldest English-language school in Southeast Asia

1824 – Joseph Aspdin patents Portland cement, “an improvement in the mode of producing an artificial stone” with his Majesty King George IV’s High Court of Chancery

1830 – Georg von Dollmann born, German architect; designer of the Linderhof Palace

1833 – Alfred Nobel born, Swedish chemist and engineer; inventor of dynamite; founder the Nobel Prize

1854 – Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses leave Britain for Scutari, in the Ottoman Empire, to tend sick or wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War

1867 – The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed in Kansas by southern Great Plains Indian leaders, requiring them to relocate to a western Oklahoma reservation

1874 – Giuseppe Giacosa born, Italian poet, playwright, and co-librettist for Puccini’s La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly with Luigi Illica

1876 – Jay Norwood Darling born, American political cartoonist

1879 – Thomas Edison invents a workable electric light bulb, which is the first commercially practical light bulb, but not the first light bulb invented

1888 – The Swiss Social Democratic Party is founded, currently the only left wing political party with representatives on the Swiss Federal Council

1891 – Ted Shawn born, American Modern Dance pioneer

1894 – Edogawa Ranpo, born as Tarō Hirai, Japanese author of mystery fiction; The Boy Detectives Club, The Fiend with Twenty Faces, and others have be translated

1896 – Esther Shumiatcher-Hirschbein born in Belorussia, Canadian Yiddish poet, playwright and screenwriter; she moved to New York after her marriage in 1918 to New York Yiddish playwright Peretz Hirschbein, where she published two children’s plays intended for use in the Yiddish secular schools. In 1940, the couple moved to Hollywood.  She is noted for writing poems about pregnancy, motherhood, and grief when her husband died

1907 – The Merry Widow opens in New York City

1910 – HMS Niobe arrives in Halifax Harbour, and becomes the first ship in the Royal Canadian Navy

1911 – Mary Robinson Blair born, American artist and children’s author who drew concepts for the Walt Disney animated films of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Song of the South and Cinderella; also worked on designs for attractions at Disneyland

Mary Robinson Blair and one of her Cinderella preliminary concept studies 

1912 – Georg Solti born, Hungarian-English conductor and director

1917 – WWI: American soldiers first saw action on the front lines in France

1917 – Dizzy Gillespie born, American trumpet player, composer, and bandleader

1921 – President Warren G. Harding delivers the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in southern U.S. states

1921 – Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld born, Dutch astronomer, credited with discovery or co-discovery of 4,625 numbered minor planets

1921 – Malcolm Arnold born, English composer of symphonies, ballets and film scores

1928 – Eudóxia Froehlich born, Brazilian zoologist, noted for her work on land planarians (flatworms) and arachnids

1929 – Ursula K. Le Guin born, American author, poet and critic; The Left Hand of Darkness, The Earthsea series, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven; became a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grandmaster in 2003

1931 – The Sakurakai, an ultranationalist secret society within the Imperial Japanese Army, launches an abortive coup d’état attempt

1933 – Maureen Duffy born, English author, poet, and playwright of Rites, and its sequel, Washouse, and A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square; activist for LGBT and animal rights

1935 – Derek Bell born, Irish harp player, pianist, and songwriter

1940 – Marita Petersen born, Faroese politician,  special needs teacher and school manager; the first woman Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands (1993-1994); first female speaker of the Løgting (Parliament 1994-1995); Leader of Javnaðarflokkurin (Faroese Socialist Party); Minister of Cultural Affairs (1991-1993); member of the Løgting (1988-1998 – except when she was a minster or prime minister). When she became Prime Minister, unemployment rates were at a record high, people were leaving the country, the fishing industry was struggling, protests occurred almost daily, and the economy was on the brink of collapse. As Prime Minister, Petersen spearheaded tough negotiations with the Danish Government and the Danish Bank, preventing the Faroese economy from crashing. She also reached an agreement with the trade unions to cut back wages in order to avoid mass lay-offs in the public sector. When she first became a member of the Løgting, she was one of only three women representatives. Today, 10 of the 33 members are women, and many more women are involved in both the ministries and local government. Petersen is credited as “the woman who saved the Faroe Islands,” and is an icon for the islands’ women. She died of cancer at the age of 60 in 2001

1940 – Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published

1940 – Frances Fitzgerald born, American journalist, historian and nonfiction author; Fire in the Lake won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

1945 – Women vote for the first time in France

1946 – Jane Heal born, British philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and language; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge since 2012; first woman President of St. John’s College, Cambridge (1999-2003); professor at Cambridge (1999-2012); lecturer at Cambridge (1986-1999); lecturer at Newcastle University (1975-1985); author of Mind, Reason and Imagination

1956 – The British Army captures Kenyan Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi; his execution signals the end of the violent uprising against the British colonial government, disputing the right of white British colonialists to continually expropriate traditional tribal lands, which had been upheld by the British Kenya High Court in 1921

1956 – Carrie Fisher born, American actress and author; noted for her book and screenplay, Postcards from the Edge

1958 – Buddy Holly’s last studio recording session, including “Raining in My Heart”

1959 – The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens to the public in New York City

1965 – Comet Ileya-Seki approaches perihelion, passing 279,617 miles (450,00 km) from the sun

1967 – More than 100,000 Vietnam War protesters hold a peaceful rally in Washington DC at the Lincoln Memorial, but their march to the Pentagon leads to clashes with soldiers and U.S. Marshalls, described by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night

1971 – President Nixon nominates William H. Rehnquist to the U.S. Supreme Court

1973 – Lera Auerbach born to a Jewish family in Soviet Russia; orchestral composer and pianist; she defected to the U.S. in 1991 during a concert tour, and studied composition at the Julliard School; made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2002, performing her own Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra

1977 – The European Patent Institute is founded

1983 –The 17^th General Conference on Weights and Measures defines a metre as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second

1988 – Former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, are indicted in New York on charges of fraud and racketeering

1990 – The first Apple Day * held at Covent Garden in London

2003 – Invoking a hastily-passed law, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ordered a feeding tube reinserted into Terry Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman caught between sides in bitter right-to-die battle

2005 – Images are taken which document the existence of the dwarf planet Eris

2010 – The first Celebration of the Mind Day, * honoring Martin Gardner, authority on Lewis Carroll, popular math and science writer, on his birthday anniversary

2015 – The first Back to the Future Day * – In the movie Back the Future, Marty McFly and the modified Delorean arrive in the future on October 21, 2015, at 4:29 pm

2016 – Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte took a first step toward restoring ties with China on Thursday, meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to resume direct talks on disputes in the South China Sea after years of rising tensions over the issue. The visit came a day after Duterte declared it was “time to say goodbye” to the U.S. Though no major deals were made, Xi and Duterte reportedly signed 13 agreements and also agreed to talk further about territorial disputes

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