February 21st is

Sticky Bun Day

National Grain-Free Day

International Mother Language Day *

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MORE! Claudia Jones, Barbara Jordan and Malcolm X, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Pagan – Feralia: Ancient Roman public holiday, marking the end of Parentalia, a nine-day festival honoring family ancestors. This day, Roman citizens brought offerings to the tombs of their dead: wreaths, sprinklings of grain and salt, bread soaked in wine, and violets to scatter. As a time of public mourning, no marriages were allowed on Feralia, magistrates didn’t wear their insignia, no incense was offered to the gods, and there were no fires lit on hearths    

Bangladesh – Shahid Dibosh
(Martyred language students day)

Bhutan – Anniversary of His Majesty

Norway – Birthday of King Harald V

Philippines – Tagum City: Musikahan
(Music, Agriculture and Cultural Festival)

South Africa – Armed Forces Day

Vanuatu – Dr. W.H. Lini Day
(Father of Independence)

Zimbabwe – Robert Mugabe Youth Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

362 – Church leader and theologian Athanasius returns to Alexandria, after Julian succeeds his father Constantius as Roman Emperor, and issues an edict permitting exiled bishops of the Galileans to return to their home cities

1245 – Thomas, the first known Bishop of Finland, is granted resignation after confessing to torture and forgery

1437 – James I of Scotland is assassinated, having alienated many of the Scots nobles because of his acquisitive claiming of their properties for the Crown, and the raising of taxes to pay for his military disasters. The queen, Joan Beaufort, is wounded but survives, and their six-year-old son becomes James II

1440 – The Prussian Confederation is formed; 19 Prussian cities band together to oppose the Teutonic Knights, who imposed high taxes on them to pay off reparations after their defeat by the Kingdom of Poland, and to re-arm for more war

1543 – Ethiopian-Adal War, Battle of Wayna Daga: Emperor Galawdewos of the Ethiopian Empire leads a combined army of Ethiopian and Portuguese troops against the army of the Adal Sultanate under Iman Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi, with 200 mercenary Ottoman musketeers. The Ethiopians win a decisive victory

1556 – Sethus Calvisius born, German late Renaissance composer, chronologer and astronomer; director of the Thomanerchor (boys choir) at the Leipzig Thomaskirche; in astronomy, his Opus Chronologicum expounded a system based on records of nearly 300 eclipses, and Elenchus Calendarii Gregoriani proposed calendar reform

1559 – Nurhaci born, a Jurchen chieftain, part of the Aisin Gioro clan, who rose to power as Khan of the Later Jin from 1616 to 1626 by unifying the Jurchen tribes. The Jurchen would soon be better known as the Manchus

1621 – Rebecca Nurse born, first victim of the Salem witch trials in America

1791 – Carl Czerny is born, Austrian composer; his piano study books are still widely used

1804 – The first self-propelled locomotive on rails demonstrated in Wales

1821 – Charles Scribner born, American publisher, founder of Charles Scribner and Company, which would become Charles Scribner’s Sons, notable publishers of prominent American authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, and Edith Wharton

1828 – The first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix is printed. It is the first newspaper published by Native Americans, and the first published partially in an Indian language. The original newspaper was published until 1834. In recent years, the paper has been revived, and is now published by the Cherokee Nation as a monthly broadsheet in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, with an online version available on the Internet

1836 – Leo Delibes born, French ballet and opera composer; Coppélia and Lakmé 

1842 – John J. Greenough patents a sewing machine

1846 – Sarah G Bagley, first recorded woman telegrapher, becomes superintendent of the Lowell MA telegraph office; organizer and president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association

1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto

1855 – Alice Freeman Palmer born, advocate of higher education for women, President of Wellesley College (1881-1887), the first woman president of a nationally known college; first Dean of Women at the University of Chicago (1892-1895)

1858 – The first electric burglar alarm is installed in Boston MA

1858 – Mpilo Walter Benson Rubusana born, Black South African newspaper editor, author and activist; co-founder with John Tengo Jabavu of the Xhosa-language newspaper Izwi Labantu (Voice of the People), published a collection of traditional poetry and wrote a history of South Africa. He was the first Black person to be elected to the Cape Council (Parliament) in 1909, and initiated the Native Education Association, which led toward the formation of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in 1912, which was renamed the African National Congress (ANC)

1866 – Lucy B. Hobbs is the first woman to graduate from dental school, the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in Cincinnati

1874 – The Oakland Daily Tribune begins publication

1876 – Constantin Brancusi born, Romanian abstract sculptor

Wisdom of the Earth, by Constantin Brancusi

1878 – First U.S. telephone directory is distributed to residents in New Haven CT, a single page of fifty names

1885 – The Washington Monument is dedicated

1895 – The majority in the North Carolina legislature, black Republicans and white Populists, vote to adjourn for the day to mark the death of Frederick Douglass

1896 – Suryakant Tripathi, known as Nirala, born in British India, Bengali-language poet, novelist, short-story writer and essayist, often writing about social injustice and exploitation; noted for his poetry works Saroj Smriti and Raam Ki Shaktipuja

1888 –Clemence Dane born as Winifred Ashton, English novelist and playwright; her first novel, Regiment of Women, was a semi-veiled treatment of lesbian relationships; noted for A Bill of Divorcement, Third Person Singular and Enter Sir John, coauthored with Helen Simpson

1893 – Andrés Segovia born, virtuoso Spanish guitarist

1895 – Carl Peter Henrik Dam born, Danish biochemist; discovers vitamin K (1939)

1903 – Anaïs Nin is born in France, Cuban-American author of 69 volumes of journals, and novels including Delta of Venus and Little Birds

1904 – The National Ski Association is formed in Ishpeming, MI

1907 –W.H. Auden born in England, American poet, playwright and composer

1914 – Jean Frances Tatlock born, American physician and psychiatrist; a member of the Communist Party who wrote for their publication, Western Worker; when she began a relationship with physicist Robert Oppenheimer in 1936, her Communist associations brought her under surveillance by the FBI and her phone was tapped; stress and clinical depression led to her suicide in January, 1944

1915 – Claudia Cumberbatch Jones born in Trinidad, came to the U.S as a child, American communist, author, and black nationalist; wrote a column called “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker; when deported from the U.S. in 1955, she moved to the UK, and founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette, in 1958; noted for “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”

1916 – The WWI Battle of Verdun begins in France, which will finally end on December 18, 1916

1924 – Thelma Estrin born, American computer scientist and engineer, pioneer in expert systems and biomedical engineering, applying computer technology to medical research and healthcare; IEEE Centennial Medal (1984)

1924 – Dorothy Blum born, American cryptanalyst and computer scientist who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and its predecessors from 1944 to 1980, becoming the first woman in the NSA’s management hierarchy in 1972, as chief of NSA Computer Operations

1925 – The first issue of The New Yorker is published

1931 – Alka Seltzer is introduced

1932 – William N. Goodwin patents the camera exposure meter

1933 – Nina Simone born, American singer-songwriter and pianist; her song, “Mississippi Goddam,” in response to Medgar Evers’ murder and the Birmingham Alabama church bombing that killed 4 pre-teen black girls and blinded a 5th, was banned in several Southern states, but it became one of the Civil Rights Movement’s anthems

1936 – Barbara Jordan born, politician and civil rights leader; first African-American woman in Texas elected to the U.S. Congress (1973-1979), sponsored expanding coverage of the Voting Rights Act and voted to impeach Nixon; taught seventeen years at University of Texas; awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom (1994)

1942 – Margarethe von Trotta born, German film director, a notable member of the New German Cinema movement, considered Germany’s foremost postwar woman director; her Sister films,  Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (Schwestern oder die Balance des Glücks, Marianne and Juliane (Die Bleierne Zeit, and Three Sisters (Paura e amore) established her career

1947 – Edwin Land demonstrates the Polaroid Land Camera to the Optical Society of America in New York City, the first camera to take, develop and print a black-and-white picture on photo paper all in about 60 seconds. It goes on sale in 1948 for $89.75

1947 – Olympia Snowe born, Republican U.S. Senator from Maine (1995-2013); health care access and abortion rights advocate; cited extreme partisanship causing Congressional dysfunction when she retired; now co-chair of Bipartisan Policy Center Commission on Political Reform

1950 – The first International Pancake Race was held in Liberal KS

1954 – Christina Rees born, British Labour Co-operative politician and barrister; Member of Parliament for Neath since 2015

1958 – The first Gibson Flying V guitar is shipped from a factory in Kalamazoo MI

1965 – Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City at age 39 by assassins identified as Black Muslims

1967 – Sari Essayah born, Finnish Christian Democratic politician; member of the European Parliament (2009-2014); party secretary for the Christian Democrats (2007-2009);Member of the Finnish Parliament (2003-2007 and current member since 2015) Former race walker who won the 1993 World Championship, and the 1994 European Championship, as well as holding seven Finnish national records

1968 – McGraw-Hill outbids eight other publishers for the U.S. rights to Hunter Davies’ authorized biography of the Beatles, paying $150,000

1975 – Former U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell and H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman are sentenced to 2 ½ to 8 years in prison for the Watergate cover-up

1988 – In Baton Rouge LA, TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart confesses to his congregation  his guilt of an unspecified sin, and that he is leaving the pulpit temporarily – reports link him to a prostitute

1989 – U.S. President George H.W. Bush calls Ayatollah Khomeini’s death warrant against “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie “deeply offensive to the norms of civilized behavior”

1995 – Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Leader, Saskatchewan, in Canada

1999 – International Mother Language Day * announced by UNESCO, commemorating the 1952 Bangladesh “language martyr” students, and celebrating cultural diversity

2001 – U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft asks William H. Webster, former head of the FBI and CIA, to undertake a “comprehensive independent review of FBI procedures” after allegations that an FBI agent has been spying for the Russians

2005 – Great Britain’s Royal Navy announces that it will allow same-sex couples to live in family quarters if they are in registered partnership

2013 – Michael Edwards, British poet and professor of comparative literature, becomes the first English person elected to the Académie française

Michael Edwards (glasses, center of photo) at the Académie française

2015 – In Tokyo, thousands protest outside the Kokkai, (National Diet of Japan, a bicameral legislature) against relocating a U.S. military base on Okinawa Island, expressing concern about noise, air pollution, and increased crime

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