November 8th is

Cook Something Bold and Pungent Day

World Urbanism Day *

Cappuccino Day

X-ray Day *

Harvey Wallbanger Day

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MORE! Julian of Norwich,  Arnold Bax and Dorothy Day, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Bulgaria – Archangelovden
(Saint Michael’s Day)

Micronesia – Pohnpei:
Constitution Day

Mongolia – National Pride Day
(Chinggis Khaan’s Birthday)

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On This Day in HISTORY

1278 – Trần Thánh Tông, second emperor of the Trần dynasty in Đại Việt (now Vietnam), who reigned from 1258 to 1278, cedes the throne to his son Trần Nhân Tông, and assumes the title of Thái thượng hoàng (Retired Emperor)

1342 –Julian of Norwich born, English anchoress and mystic; her Revelations of Divine Love is the first theological book in the English language attributed with certainty to a woman; venerated in the Anglican and Lutheran churches, but not beatified by the Roman Catholic church

1519 – Hernán Cortés enters Tenochtitlán and Aztec ruler Moctezuma welcomes him with a great celebration

1555 – Nyaungyan Min born, King of Burma (1599-1605); considered the Nyaungyan Dynasty’s founder; started reunification process after the collapse of the Toungoo Dynasty

1602 –The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library opens for scholars and students

1605 – Under torture, Guy Fawkes reveals what he knows of the Gunpowder Plot, and the British government names ringleader Robert Catesby as a wanted man. Catesby and his remaining followers reach Holbeche House, but Richard Walsh, Sheriff of Worcester and his 200 men kill five conspirators, including Catesby, and take the rest into custody

1614 – Japanese daimyō Dom Justo Takayama Ukon is exiled to the Philippines by shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu for being a Christian

1644 – The Shunzhi Emperor, third emperor of the Qing dynasty (which originated in Manchuria), is enthroned in Beijing as the first Qing emperor to rule over China, after the collapse of the Ming dynasty

1656 – Edmund Halley born, English astronomer, computed ‘his’ comet’s orbit

1710 – Sarah Fielding born, English author; wrote The Governess, or the Little Female Academy, the first English novel aimed specifically at children

1745 – Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” to the thrones of Scotland, England, France and Ireland, enters England with over 5,000 men

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, at 22, painted by Antonio David, 1732
– Scottish National Gallery

1793 – The Louvre Museum in Paris opens to the public

Projet d’aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre, c. 1789
by Hubert Robert, Musée du Louvre

1805 – The Lewis and Clark expedition, aka “the Corps of Discovery” reaches the Pacific Ocean, almost a year and a half after their departure on May 14, 1804

1837 – Mary Lyon founds Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which later becomes  Mount Holyoke College

1847 – Bram Stoker born, Irish author of Dracula

1878 – Dorothea Bate born, English paleontologist and pioneer in archaeozoology; studied fossils of extinct mammals to understand how and why giant and dwarf forms evolved; first known woman to be employed as a scientist by the Natural History Museum in London; made many expeditions to Mediterranean Islands and elsewhere to find prehistoric fauna remains

1880 – French actress Sarah Bernhardt makes her American stage debut in Adrienne Lecouvreur in New York City

1883 – Arnold Bax born, English composer and poet, noted for his series of symphonic poems, including Tintagel

1884 – Hermann Rorschach born, Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, notable for his development of the Rorschach Test

1895 – X-ray Day * – Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays while experimenting with electricity and takes the first X-rays  

Wilhelm Röntgen’s first X-ray

1897 – Dorothy Day born, American journalist and social activist; one of Alice Paul’s ‘Silent Sentinels’ for woman’s suffrage, carrying signs in front of the White House; co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement

1899 – In the state of Sonora, Mexico, Federal troops crush the “La Angostura Uprising” of Yaqui Indians opposed to the government of President Díaz. Most of the Yaquis who survive the massacre were transported to the Yucatán

1900 – Margaret Mitchell born, American author of Gone With the Wind

1908 – Martha Gellhorn born, novelist, travel writer, journalist and war correspondent, was one of two little girls who represented “future voters” at a demonstration for woman’s suffrage at the 1916 national Democratic convention in St. Louis; she went to Europe in 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, and worked at the United Press Paris bureau; returned to the U.S. and worked with photographer Dorothea Lange for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, documenting hungry and homeless people; went with Ernest Hemingway to Barcelona in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War, then reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, and covered WWII from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore and England; posed as a stretcher bearer to cover D-Day, the only woman to land at Normandy; one of the journalists who covered the liberation of Dachau; her four-year marriage to Hemingway ended in divorce in 1945, in part because of conflict over her career; she worked for Atlantic Monthly, covering the Vietnam War, the Arab-Israel conflicts and the civil wars in Central America; retired in 1995 at the age of 87 because of failing eyesight; The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was created in her honor in 1999

1910 – William H. Frost patents an insect exterminator

1922 – Christiaan Barnard born, South African cardiac surgeon; performed the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967

1922 – Thea Drell Hodge born, American computer scientist, a pioneer in the field who mentored many women students; founded the Minnesota chapter of the Association for Women in Computing, and mentored countless young women in her field; member of the Association for Computing Machinery, which inducted her into their hall of fame in 2004

1923 – Adolf Hitler makes his first attempt at seizing power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich now known as the “Beer-Hall Putsch”

1926 – Darleane C. Hoffman born, American nuclear chemist; in the 1950s she applied for a position in the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the radiochemistry group, but was told, “We don’t hire women in that division.” She persisted, and was hired by an enlightened male group leader, becoming a division leader of the isotope and nuclear chemistry division, the first woman to head a scientific division there; senior faculty scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; one of the researchers who confirmed the existence of Seaborgium, element 106; recipient of the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1997

1932 – Ben Bova born, American sci-fi writer; six-time winner of the Hugo Award; editor of Analog magazine (1972-1978); noted for Exiles and Grand Tour series

1932 – Franklin Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover for his first term as U.S. president

1933 – The Civil Works Administration is created by executive order by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to create jobs for more than 4 million unemployed Americans

1939 – Life With Father premieres on Broadway

1947 – Margaret Rhea Seddon born, American physician, researcher on the effects of radiation therapy on nutrition in cancer patients, and NASA astronaut (1979-1997); she was the seventh woman in space, and flew on missions in 1985, 1991 and 1993; currently assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group in Nashville, Tennessee

1949 – Día Mundial del Urbanismo, World Urbanism Day, * also  known as World Town Planning Day, founded by Argentinian Professor Carlos Maria della Paolera of the University of Buenos Aires to promote creating livable communities

1951 – Dame Laura M. Cox born, English, Queen’s Bench High Court judge

1956 – After turning down 18,000 names, the Ford Motor Company decided to name their new car the “Edsel,” after Henry Ford’s only son

1960 – Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy defeats VP Richard Nixon for the U.S. presidency

1965 – The soap opera “Days of Our Lives” debuts on NBC-TV

1966 – Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts becomes the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote, and Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California

1971 – Led Zeppelin releases album Led Zeppelin IV, including “Stairway to Heaven”

1978 – Emma Lewell-Black born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for South Shields since 2013, the first women to represent South Shields; member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee since 2013, and of the Work and Pensions Select Committee since 2015

1979 – The program, The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage, premieres on ABC-TV, and evolves into the evening news program Nightline

1980 – Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California announce the discovery of a 15th moon orbiting the planet Saturn

1983 – Danielle Evans born, American fiction writer; her first short story collection won the 2011 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize

1984 – South Africa: a year after the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed, Security police raided their offices during nation-wide unrest. The UDF became the umbrella organisation of anti-apartheid groups after the banning of leading groups like African National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and the South African Communist Party (SACP) under the Unlawful Organisations Act passed after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960

1985 – Sting’s concert movie Bring On the Night opens in the U.S.

1985 – Under Nigerian head of state Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime, which overthrew the civilian government of Shehu Shagari in 1983, the national debt greatly increased, and at this time emergency economic action was taken, including cutting Nigeria’s international diplomatic missions by half

1990 – President George H. W. Bush orders 150,000 more soldiers to be deployed in the Persian Gulf, joining the multi-national forces fighting Iraq

1991 – The European Community and Canada impose economic sanctions on Yugoslavia in an attempt to stop the Balkan civil war

1992 – About 350,000 people rally in Berlin against racist violence

1993 – Five Picasso paintings and other artwork valued at $52 million are stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Sweden

1994 – Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954

1997 – Chinese engineers divert the Yangtze River to begin work on Three Gorges Dam

2000 – Waco special counsel John Danforth releases report absolving the federal government of wrongdoing in the 1993 Branch Davidian siege

2004 – U.S. troops attack Sunni insurgent strong holds in Iraq

2011 –Asteroid 2005 YU55 passes .85 lunar distances from Earth (201,700 mi/324,600 km), the closest known approach by an asteroid of this brightness since 1976

2016 – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly announces demonetization of  ₹500 and ₹1000 denomination banknotes, effective November 9, trying to curb corruption, black money, the use of counterfeit currency , and terrorism. It causes severe cash shortages in banks across India, and 86% of Indian currency in circulation becomes invalid

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