November 18th is

Apple Cider Day

Mickey Mouse Birthday *

Occult Day

Push-Button Phone Day

Vichyssoise Day

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MORE! Asa Gray, Margaret Atwood and Fats Domino, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

African Statistics Day *

Bolivia – Beni:
Anniversary of Beni Festival

Haiti – Vertières Battle Day *

Latvia – Republic Proclamation

Morocco & Western Sahara –
Independence Day

Oman – National Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

326 – The old, original St. Peter’s Basilica is consecrated in Rome, on the former site of the Circus of Nero

401 – King Alaric I leads the Visigoths across the Alps to invade northern Italy

701 – Itzam K’an Ahk II born, ajaw (ruler) of Piedra Negras, an ancient Mayan settlement in Guatemala

glyph of Itzam K’an Ahk II

1307 (Legend) – William Tell shoots an arrow through an apple on his son’s head

1626 – The new St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican is consecrated

1785 – Sir David Wilkie born, Scottish painter and etcher

The Penny Wedding, by Sir David Wilkie

1786 – Carl Maria von Weber born, German composer

1787 – Louis Daguerre, French physicist and photographer, developed the daguerreotype

1803 – Battle of Vertières, * last major battle of the Haitian Revolution, leads to the Republic of Haiti, first black republic in the Western Hemisphere

1810 – Asa Gray born, leading American botanist; co-author with John Torrey of Flora of North America. He pursued the mystery of a plant discovered and preserved as a specimen by a French botanist on a 1788 trip to America, which Gray saw in 1839 while visiting Paris, labeled only “Hautes montagnes de Carolinie” (High mountains of Carolina). This sent him on an arduous wild goose chase to heights of mountains in the Carolinas. He decided to name the elusive plant Shortia galacifolia, after his friend and fellow botanist, Charles Wilkin Short. The mystery remained unsolved until 1877, when the 17-year-old son of an amateur botanist found an unfamiliar plant, and his father sent a specimen to Asa Gray. For 38 years, Asa Gray and others had been looking in the wrong place. The Shortia galacifolia didn’t grow in the mountains – it was found beside the Catawba River in the lowlands of North Carolina. The French specimen was mislabeled.

Oconee bell – Shortia galicifolia

1825 – Susan Tolman Mills born; with her husband Cyrus, founded Mills Seminary, a boarding school for young women, which became Mills College, the first women’s college in California; in 1890, she became the college’s president, hiring architect Julia Morgan in 1904 to design six buildings to expand the campus; she retired in 1909 at the age of 84

1836 – W. S. Gilbert born, English playwright and lyricist; with composer Arthur Sullivan,  wrote 14 operettas, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado

1857 – Rose Markwood Knox born, with her husband Charles Knox, developed the world’s first pre-granulated gelatin, eliminating the difficult process of making gelatin at home; when her husband died in 1908, Rose Knox ran the company for the next 40 years, and died at age 93, still chair of the Knox Board of Directors

Knox Gelatine – 1927

1860 – Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Polish pianist, composer, and politician

1865 – Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is published in the New York Saturday Press

1872 – Beebe Steven Lynk born, one of the first African-American women chemists and chemistry teachers; she earned a degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of West Tennessee (then a two-year, pre-bachelor degree for teachers) in 1903, and became one of the two women faculty members (out of 10) at UWT’s new medical school, where she taught Latin botany and materia medica (collected knowledge of healing properties of various substances); author of Advice to Colored Women, published in 1896;  active in the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, and an advocate for women’s rights

1874 – Clarence Day born, American author of Life with Father

1878 – Soprano Marie Selika Williams becomes the first Black artist to perform at the White House, in Washington D.C.

1878 – Georgia Bullock born, first woman member of the Los Angeles Bar Association; first woman attorney to defend a client charged with murder; founder of the Women Lawyer’s Club of Los Angeles; first woman on the bench of the Los Angeles Women’s Court; first woman California Superior Court judge (1931-1955)

1882 –Wyndham Lewis born, British Vorticist painter, writer-editor and art critic

Wyndam Lewis as The Tyro – self-portrait

1882 – Frances Gertrude McGill born, pioneering Canadian forensic pathologist, pathologist, criminologist, and allergist; earned her medical degree at the University of Manitoba in 1915, then became the provincial bacteriologist (1918) and pathologist (1920) of Saskatchewan, working closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and local law enforcement for over 30 years. She traveled across the province conducting forensic examinations, and was an active supporter for establishing the first RCMP forensic laboratory (1937). A newspaper dubbed her the “Sherlock Holmes of Saskatchewan.” She became the forensic lab’s second director (1943-1946), as well as training new Mounties in forensic methods of detection, and medical jurisprudence. After she left the director position, she was appointed as Honorary Surgeon, and continued as a consultant until her death in 1959

1883 – American and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times

1888 – Frances Marion born as Marion Owens, author, film director and screenwriter; first writer to win two Academy Awards, Best Adaptation for The Big House and Best Story for The Champ; also wrote the scenarios for silent classics starring Lillian Gish: The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928)

Mary Pickford, star of the United Artists war drama Straight is the Way,
with director Frances Marion, on the set in 1920

1891 – Gio Ponti born, Italian architect and designer

La Quinta El Cerrito, designed by Gio Ponti

1899 – Eugene Ormandy, Hungarian-American violinist and conductor

1901 – George Gallup born, American statistician and pioneer in opinion polling

1903 – Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty between the U. S. and Panama gives the United States exclusive rights over the Panama Canal Zone

1905 – Prince Carl of Denmark becomes King Haakon VII of Norway

1909 – Johnny Mercer born, American lyricist, songwriter and composer

1914 – Bettie Cilliers-Barnard born, South African painter and teacher, noted for her symbolic and non-figurative art

Bettie Cilliers-Barnard: Title not listed and Wash Day

1918 – Latvia declares its independence from Russia

1923 – Alan B. Shepherd born, first American astronaut to travel in space

1924 – “Lise” Østergaard born, Danish psychologist and Social-Democratic politician; Minister of Culture (1980-1982), and chaired the 1980 UN World Conference on Women in Copenhagen; Minister without Portfolio (1977-1980); member of the Folketing (Danish Parliament – 1979-1984); spokesperson for the Danish Refugee Council (1974-1977); first woman to become professor of clinical psychology at Copenhagen University (1963); head of psychology at Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet  (State Hospital – 1958); published Den psykologiske testmetode og dens relation til klinisk psykiatri (The Psychological Test Method and its Relationship to Clinical Psychiatry) in 1961

1928 – Sheila Jordan born, American Jazz singer-songwriter

1928 – Mickey Mouse is ‘born’ when the animated short Steamboat Willie is released, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks

1932 – Amy Johnson, British aviator, who already held several solo flying records, arrives in Cape Town, South Africa, from England, breaking her previous record by over ten hours

1936 – Germany and Italy recognize the Spanish government of Dictator Francisco Franco

1938 – Trade union members elect John L. Lewis as the first president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations

1939 – Margaret Atwood, Canadian author, poet, and critic; among her 16 novels to date, particularly notable for her iconic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award; and The Blind Assassin, winner of the Man Booker Prize

1939 – Margaret Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington born, English BBC television journalist and politician, Minister for Women (1998-2001) Leader of the House of Lords and Lord Privy Seal (1988-2001)

1944 – Edwin C. Krupp born, American astronomer, Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles CA

1945 – Wilma Mankiller born, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1985-1995), community organizer

1946 – Alan Dean Foster born, American scifi-fantasy writer

1948 –Ana Mendieta born in Cuba, American performance artist and sculptor

1949 – The Iva Valley Shooting occurs after the coal miners of Enugu in Nigeria strike over withheld wages; 21 miners are shot dead and 51 are wounded by police under the British colonial administration of Nigeria

1955 – Carter Burwell born, American composer, film scores for Fargo, Being John Malkovich, and The Blind Side among many others

1956 – Fats Domino performs “Blueberry Hill” on the Ed Sullivan Show

1960 – Yeşim Ustaoğlu born, Turkish producer-director-screenwriter, who made several award-winning shorts before her feature film debut in 1994, Iz (The Trace). Her 1999 film, Günese Yolculuk (Journey to the Sun) won the Blue Angel Award for Best European Film at Berlinale. Other films: Bulutlari Beklerken (Waiting for the Clouds), Pandora’nin Kutusu (Pandora’s Box), Araf (Somewhere in Between), and Tereddut (Clair Obscur)

1961 – U.S. President Kennedy orders 18,000 military advisers to South Vietnam

1963 – The first push-button telephone goes into service

1964 – Rita Cosby born, American television news anchor and correspondent; CBS Inside Edition (2007 to present); author of a biography of Anna Nicole Smith, Blonde Ambition and a memoir, Quiet Hero: Secrets From My Father’s Past

1966 – Roman Catholics are no longer required to abstain from eating meat on Fridays

1970 – U.S. President Richard Nixon asks Congress for $155 million in supplemental aid for the Cambodian government

1976 – Spain’s parliament approves a bill establishing a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship, and a brief period of constitutional monarchy

1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones leads his Peoples Temple to mass murder–suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo Ryan, on a fact-finding mission to Jonestown, is murdered hours earlier by the Peoples Temple members who are escorting him

1981 – Maggie Stiefvater born, American author of Young Adult fantasy fiction; noted for her two series, The Wolves of Mercy Falls and The Raven Cycle

1987 – The congressional Iran-Contra committees issued their final report, saying President Ronald Reagan bore “ultimate responsibility” for wrongdoing by his aides

1988 – U.S. President Reagan signs a bill allowing death penalty for drug traffickers

1990 – African Statistics Day * is adopted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Conference of African Ministers on Planning and Development to ‘increase public awareness about the important role which statistics play in all aspects of social and economic life”

1991 – Shiite Muslim kidnappers in Lebanon release Anglican Church envoys Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland

1993 – U.S. House of Representatives approves the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while in South Africa,  21 political parties approve a new constitution, expanding voting rights and ending white minority rule

1993 – In South Africa, 21 political parties approve a new constitution, expanding voting rights and ending white minority rule

2002 – U.N. arms inspectors return to Iraq after a four-year hiatus, calling on Saddam Hussein’s government to cooperate with their search for weapons of mass destruction

2003 – The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules 4–3 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, giving the state legislature 180 days to change the law, making Massachusetts the first U.S. state to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples

2009 – Two days before turning 92, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WVA), becomes the longest-serving lawmaker in congressional history, at 56 years, 320 days

2013 – NASA launches the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) probe to Mars. Mission goals include determining how the planet’s atmosphere and water, presumed to have once been substantial, were lost over time. The probe reached Mars and went into an aerocentric orbit on September 22, 2014

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