November 19th is

Gettysburg Address Day *

National Macchiato Day

International Men’s Day *

Rocky and Bullwinkle Day *

Women’s Entrepreneurship Day

World Philosophy Day

World Toilet Day *

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MORE! Nina Bari, Dick Cavett  and Ofra Haza, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Belize – Garifuna Settlement Day *

Italy – Cremona: Nougat Festival
(through November 25)

Monaco – Fète de le Prince Souverain

Oman – HM Sultan Qaboos Birthday

Puerto Rico – Discovery Day

Switzerland – Zurich: Landesmuseum
Illuminarium (through December 30)

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On This Day in HISTORY

1493 – Christopher Columbus goes ashore on an island he calls San Juan Bautista (modern-day Puerto Rico)

1563 – Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, born; English statesman, soldier, patron of the arts and poet; John Dowland wrote “Syr Robert Sidney His Galliard” to honor him

1600 – Charles I born, King of England, Scotland and Ireland; his battles with Parliament over his belief in the absolute divine right of kings, including taxation without Parliamentary consent, and his interference in religious matters, led to the English Civil War, and his own trial and execution

King Charles I: Le Roi a la Chasse, by Anthony Van Dyck

1617 – Eustache Le Sueur born, French artist, co-founder of the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture, now a branch of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. (Le Sueur out-rococo’d just about everybody)

Abduction of Gannymede by Jupiter – by Eustace Le Sueur

1722 – Benjamin Chew born, American Quaker, attorney, jurist and legal scholar, Chief Justice of the Province of Pennsylvania Supreme Court before the American Revolution; friend of George Washington, who provided pro bono his considerable knowledge of law and English legal history to America’s Founding Fathers during the creation of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights; strong supporter of a free press and free speech

1794 – The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America, known as “Jay’s Treaty” after American’s chief negotiator, John Jay, resolved such issues as withdrawal of British troops from the ‘Northwest’ territory (the  Ohio area); some U.S. trading rights with British possessions in exchange for limits on American export of cotton; and arbitration to resolve wartime debts and the US-Canadian border, one of the first uses of arbitration in diplomatic history. The terms of the treaty had a 10-year limit – when it expired, attempts at a new treaty failed, one cause of the War of 1812

1802 – Solomon Foot born, American politician and attorney; U.S. Senator, Republican from Vermont (1851-1866), and President pro tempore of the U.S. Senate (1861-1864) during the American Civil War; a strong advocate for the Union; he died in Washington DC in 1866

1802 – Garifuna Settlement Day * – the Garifuna (mixed-race descendants of African and Island Carib and Arawak people) arrive at British Honduras (now Belize)

1816 – Warsaw University, now the largest university in Poland, is established as a Royal University with the permission of Tsar Alexander I when the partitions of Poland separate Warsaw from Kraków

1845 – Agnes Giberne born in India during her father’s military service there; prolific British author and amateur astronomer; her early novels, short stories and religious tracts were mostly published under her initials A.G.; a founding member of the British Astronomical Association; her illustrated book Sun, Moon and Stars: Astronomy for Beginners (1879 was very popular, printed in several editions in the UK and the U.S.,  and was followed by Among the Stars, to introduce younger children to astronomy

1847 – Canada’s second railway line, the Montreal and Lachine  Railway, opens

1850 – The first life insurance policy for a woman was issued when Carolyn Ingraham, 36 years old, bought the policy in Madison, NJ

1863 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg PA

1876 – Tatyana Afanasyeva born, Russian-Dutch mathematician and physicist who contributed to the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics; co-authored The Conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics with her husband, Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, published in 1911

1881 – A meteorite lands near Grossliebenthal, southwest of Odessa, Ukraine

1893 – First newspaper color supplement is published in the Sunday New York World

1895 – Louise Dahl-Wolfe, American photographer, famed for work in Harper’s Bazaar

1952 shot of Evelyn Tripp, by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, for Harper’s Bazaar

1900 – Anna Seghers born as Anna Reiling, German author; joined the Communist party of Germany in 1928, and wrote Die Gefährten, a novel warning of the dangers of Fascism, which led to her arrest by the Gestapo; she left Germany in 1934, and wrote The Seventh Cross in Paris, then fled from the German invasion in 1940; after making her way to Mexico by 1941, she founded Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), an academic journal. The Seventh Cross was published in the U.S. in 1942, and made into a motion picture in 1944, one of the few depictions of a Nazi concentration camp written during WWII

1901 – Nina Bari born, Soviet mathematician, one of the first women accepted to Moscow State University’s Department of Physics and Mathematics; known for work on trigonometric series

1905 – Tommy Dorsey, American trombonist, composer and bandleader

1916 – Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn Pictures

1917 – Indira Gandhi born, Indian politician, first woman to be Prime Minister of India

1920 – Gene Tierney, American stage and film star, Laura, Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Leave Her to Heaven (Academy Award Best Actress nomination); her daughter Daria was born deaf and mentally disabled because one of Tierney’s fans broke a rubella quarantine and infected the pregnant actress while she was volunteering at the Hollywood Canteen; she later suffered from bouts of manic depressive disorder, and was unable to work for most of the period between 1955 and 1962

From classic film noir Laura, showing portrait of Gene Tierney in title role

1924 – Dame Margaret Turner-Warwick born, British physician and thoracic specialist; first woman president of the Royal College of Physicians (1989-1992)

1928 – Time magazine’s cover is in color for the first time. The subject was Japanese Emperor Hirohito

1932 – Eleanor F. Helin born, American astronomer, principal investigator of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; she discovered several comets, and was the discoverer or co-discoverer of over 900 numbered minor planets and asteroids

1936 – Dick Cavett born, American talk show host between 1968 and 1996 in various formats, noted for his skilled in-depth interviews; more recently, has been an online columnist for the New York Times

1937 –Penelope Leach born, British psychologist and author specializing in child development and parenting; Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five

1943 – Nazis liquidate Janowska concentration camp in Lemberg (Lviv), western Ukraine, murdering at least 6,000 Jews after a failed uprising and mass escape attempt

1944 – FDR announces the 6th War Loan Drive, to sell $14 billion in war bonds toward paying the U.S. cost of WWII

1946 – Afghanistan, Iceland and Sweden join the United Nations

1950 – US General Eisenhower becomes Supreme Commander of NATO-Europe

1954 – Prince Rainier III launches Télé Monte Carlo, Europe’s oldest private TV channel

1955 – National Review publishes its first issue

1956 –Eileen Collins born, American astronaut, first woman Space Shuttle pilot, and first female commander of a U.S. Spacecraft

1956 – Ann Curry born on Guam, American television journalist who has reported from war zones in Syria, Palestine, Darfur, Congo, Central African Republic, Kosovo, Israel, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq

1957 – Gettysburg Address Day * is proclaimed by U.S. President Eisenhower – also called Equal Opportunity Day

1957 – Ofra Haza born, Israeli singer-songwriter-actress

1958 – Annette Gordon-Reed born, American historian and Harvard law professor; her book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award for Nonfiction

1959 – The Ford Motor Company announces end of production of the unpopular Edsel

1967 – TVB is established, Hong Kong’s first wireless commercial TV station

1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”) third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon

1977 – Egyptian President Sadat is first Arab leader to make an official visit to Israel

1979 – Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini orders release of 13 female and black American hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran

1985 – Pennzoil wins a $10.53 billion judgment against Texaco, because Texaco executed a contract to buy Getty Oil after Pennzoil entered into an unsigned, but binding, buyout contract with Getty

1993 – U.S. Senate approves sweeping $22.3 billion anti-crime measure

1994 – In the U.K., the first National Lottery draw is held; a £1 ticket gives one-in-14-million odds of getting the winning six out of 49 numbers

1996 – Lt. General Maurice Baril of Canada arrives in Africa to lead a multi-national policing force in Zaire

1997 – U.S. premiere of Paul McCartney’s orchestral “Standing Stone” at Carnegie Hall

1998 – U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee  begins impeachment hearings against U.S. President Bill Clinton

1998 – Vincent Van Gogh’s Portrait of the Artist Without Beard sells for $71.5 million

1999 – International Men’s Day * is founded in Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on improving the health of men

2001 – The World Toilet Organization starts World Toilet Day * to highlight the 2.4 billion people living without a toilet, with a goal of preventing the spread of diseases like cholera, typhoid and hepatitis, as well as ensuring that women and children are not at risk of assault or rape because they lack indoor toilets

2002 – The U.S. government completes its takeover of security at 424 airports nationwide.

2007 – Amazon launches the Kindle E-reader

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