February 26th is
Levi Strauss Day *
For Pete’s Sake Day
Tell a Fairytale Day
World Pistachio Day
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MORE! Carter Woodson, Muhammad Ali and Oprah Winfrey, click
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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
Bahá’í – Ayyám-i-Há, the intercalary days of the Bahá’í calendar, added so that the new year will start on the vernal equinox
Azerbaijan: Remembrance
of Khojaly Massacre Victims
Kuwait – Liberation Day
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On This Day in HISTORY
747 BC – Epoch of Ptolemy’s Nabonrassar Era, starting point used to study the works of Ptolemy, which record the history of Assyria and Babylon; also an important source used by astronomers to date celestial events
Ptolemaic geocentric system, by Bartolomeu Velho, 1568
1233 – Siege of Kaifeng, Mongol-Jin War (1211-1234): The Mongols capture Kaifeng, capital of the Jin dynasty, ending a siege which lasted over ten months. Jin Emperor Aizong flees to Caizhou
1361 – Wenceslas born, will be crowned Wenceslas IV, King of Bohemia
1564 – Christopher Marlowe born, English playwright, poet and translator
1616 – Galileo Galilei is formally banned by the Roman Catholic Church from teaching or defending the view that the earth orbits the sun
1802 – Victor Hugo born, French author, poet, and playwright
1808 – Honoré Daumier born, French painter, illustrator, and sculptor
The First-Class Carriage, by Honoré Daumier
1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba, begins 2nd conquest of France
1829 – Levi Strauss Day * – Levi Strauss born in Germany, American clothing manufacturer, founder of Levi Strauss & Co
1905 advertisement
1842 – Camille Flammarion born, French astronomer and author
1846 – Buffalo Bill Cody born, American scout, hunter and showman
1848 – The second French Republic is proclaimed
1852 – John Harvey Kellogg born, developer of corn flakes as dry breakfast food
1857 – Emile Coue born, French pharmacist, autosuggestion advocate; repetition 15 to 20 times twice a day: “Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better”
1858 – Lavinia Lloyd Dock born, American nurse, feminist and social activist; contributing editor to the American Journal of Nursing; author of four-volume history of nursing and a pioneering nurse’s manual of drugs, which became the standard manual for many years
1859 – Louise Bowen born, Chicago philanthropist, saved Hull House financially in 1935, funded the Woman’s Club building, demanded removal of health hazards from Pullman Company, obtained minimum wage for women at International Harvester Company and raised $12,000 for families of strikers
1863 – U.S. President Lincoln signs the National Currency Act, aka the National Banking Act, to create a single national currency, eliminating the problem of notes having varying values in different states, from issuing banks that are subject to regulation in some states but not in others; establishes federal banks backed by the U.S Treasury, and all paper money to be produced by the government; coins had been produced by the U.S. Mint since 1792
1869 – Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing all male U.S. citizens the right to vote is sent to the states for ratification
1870 – NYC’s first pneumatic-powered subway line opens to the public, the Beach Pneumatic Transit
1876 – Japan and Korea sign a treaty granting Japanese citizens extraterritoriality rights, opening three ports to Japanese trade, and ending Korea’s status as a tributary state of Qing dynasty China
1877 – Rudolph Dirks born, American cartoonist, Katzenjammer Kids
1881 – S.S. Ceylon begins first round-the-world-cruise, from Liverpool, England
1884 – James O’Hara born, Irish-West Indian mulatto, taught free black primary schoolchildren, admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1873; Republican Congressman for North Carolina (1883-1887)
1893 – Dorothy Whipple born, English novelist and children’s author; noted for They Were Sisters, The Priory and They Knew Mr. Knight
1895 – Michael Joseph Owens patents an automatic glass blowing machine that could make multiple bottles at the same time
1900 – Halina Konopacka born, Polish athlete, writer and poet; the first Polish Olympic champion, winning the women’s discus throw at the 1928 Olympic Games. She wrote her first book of poetry, Któregoś dnia (Some Day), in 1929, and was a regular contributor to Polish literary publications. At the onset of WWII, she helped her husband, Ignacy Matuszewski, and Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, on a secret mission to evacuate the gold reserves, 75 tons of gold, of the Polish National Bank to France to help finance the Polish government-in-exile. After France surrendered to the Nazis in 1940, the couple sought refuge in the U.S., finally arriving by a circuitous route in 1941. Her husband died suddenly in New York in 1946, and she worked at a series of jobs before remarrying in 1949. Widowed a second time in 1959, she moved to Florida and took up painting. The Polish government posthumously awarded her the Silver Cross of Merit in 1989
1902 – Vercors born as Jean Marcel Bruller, French novelist and artist
1907 – The U.S. Congress raises their own pay to $7500, from $5000 in 1874; by comparison, the average worker earns 22 cents an hour; an accountant makes about $2000 a year; a mechanical engineer about $5,000 a year. In 1907, there are 8,000 cars and 144 miles of paved roads in all of America; 90% of U.S. doctors had no college education, but attend “medical schools” frequently found to be “substandard”; average life expectancy is 47 years due to the high infant mortality rate – 95% of all births happen at home; just 6% of all adult Americans are high school graduates, and 20% of the population can’t read or write. Only 230 murders are reported in the entire U.S. that year, compared to 2016, when at least 11,000 people were murdered just with firearms
1908 – Leela Majumdar born, prolific Bengali Indian author, scholar and All India Radio producer
1909 – Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion picture process, is first shown to the public at the Palace Theatre in London
1909 – Fanny Cradock born as Phyllis Pechey, English television chef and author
1910 – Mohandas Gandhi supports the resolution of the African People’s Organization (APO) to declare the day of the Prince of Wales arriving in in Cape Town as a day pf mourning, in protest of South Africa’s disenfranchisement of Black Africans, Indians, and Coloureds in the upcoming Union of South Africa
1914 – HMHS Britannic, sister to the RMS Titanic, is launched at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland
1915 – Elisabeth Eybers born, South African poet who mainly wrote in Afrikaans, although she translated some of her own poems, as well as those of other Afrikaans poets, into English. Noted for Die Ander Dors (The other thirst), and Kruis of Munt (Head or tail). She moved to Amsterdam in 1966, remaining there the rest of her life
1916 – Mutual Film Corporation signs Charlie Chaplin to a film contract to make 12 two-reel comedies for the largest annual salary yet for a motion picture star: $670,000
1918 – Theodore Sturgeon born, American author and critic
1919 – President Woodrow Wilson signs into law an act of Congress establishing the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona
1921 – Wilma S. Heide born, educator and women’s studies pioneer, president of NOW (1971-1972), spearheaded sex discrimination charges against AT&T
1926 – Carter G. Woodson starts Negro History Week, which later becomes Black History Month
1928 – Fats Domino born, American singer-songwriter and pianist
1929 – U.S. President Coolidge signs a bill creating the Grand Teton National Park
1930 – New York City installs traffic lights
1933 – A ground-breaking ceremony is held at Crissy Field for the Golden Gate Bridge
Four years later: Golden Gate Bridge – opening day in 1937
1935 – Adolf Hitler orders the Luftwaffe re-formed, violating the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles
1935 – Robert Watson-Watt carries out a demonstration near Daventry which leads directly to the development of radar in the United Kingdom
1944 – Sue Dauser, of the nurse corps, is appointed as the first female U.S. Navy captain
1945 – WWII: A nationwide midnight curfew goes into effect in the U.S.
1948 – Sharyn McCrumb born, American Appalachian “Ballad” novelist; author of the Elizabeth MacPherson mystery series
1949 – Elizabeth George born, American author of mystery novels set in Great Britain; noted for her Inspector Thomas Lynley series, adapted for a BBC television series
1950 – Helen Clark born, first woman elected (not appointed) to the office of Prime Minister of New Zealand (1999-2008); first woman Administrator of the UN Development Programme (2009-2017)
1952 – Prime Minister Winston Churchill announces Britain has an atomic bomb
1954 – U.S. Congresswoman Ruth Thompson (R-MI) introduces bill to ban mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy” recordings, aimed at rock n’ roll
1957 – The Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award is established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
1958 – Susan Helms born, U.S Air Force Lt. General and NASA Astronaut, crew member on five Space Shuttle missions and lived aboard the International Space Station for over five months in 2001; with Jim Voss, she is the co-holder of the international record for longest spacewalk, 8 hours and 56 minutes
1964 – Cassius Clay changes his name to Muhammad Ali as he accepts the Islamic faith
Muhammad Ali with Elijah Muhammad, who gave him his new name
1970 – The Beatles release “Hey Jude” in the U.S.
1970 – National Public Radio (NPR) is incorporated
1974 – Irina Vlah born, Moldovan politician; Governor of Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia since 2015; Member of Moldovan Parliament (2005-2009)
1976 – Nalini Anantharaman born, French mathematician; Professor at Université de Strasbourg since 2014; In 2018, she was awarded the Infosys Mathematical Sciences Prize for work on “Quantum Chaos.” She won the 2011 Salem Prize for her work on the Fourier Series; and co-winner in 2012 of the Henri Poincaré Prize for mathematical physics for her work in “quantum chaos, dynamical systems and Schrödinger equation, including a remarkable advance in the problem of quantum unique ergodicity.” Also in 2011, she took the Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand from the French Academy of Sciences
1980 – Egypt establishes diplomatic relations with Israel
1987 – The Tower Commission rebukes U.S. President Reagan for failing to control his national security staff in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair
John Tower, Ronald Reagan and Edmund Muskie
1987 – The U.S.S.R. conducts its first nuclear weapons test after a 19-month moratorium
1991 – Iraqi President Saddam Hussein announces on Baghdad Radio that Iraqi troops are being withdrawn from Kuwait
1993 – Six people are killed and more than a thousand injured when a van containing a bomb built by Islamic extremists explodes in the New York World Trade Center’s underground parking garage
1995 – Britain’s oldest investment banking firm, Barings PLC, collapses after a securities dealer loses more than $1.4 billion by gambling on Tokyo stock prices
1998 – A Texas jury rejects an $11 million lawsuit by Texas cattlemen, blaming Oprah Winfrey for price drop after on-air comment about mad-cow disease
2001 – A U.N. tribunal convicts Bosnian Croat political leader Dario Kordic and military commander Mario Cerkez of war crimes, because they ordered systematic murder and persecution of Muslim civilians during the Bosnian war
2002 – Alanis Morissette’s third album “Under Rug Swept” is released
2008 – The NY Philharmonic performs in Pyongyang, North Korea; the first performance of its kind in North Korea
2009 – Former Serbian president Milan Milutinovic is acquitted of war crimes during the Kosovo War by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
2009 – The Pentagon reverses its 18-year policy of banning media from covering returning war dead, allowing some media coverage if the family approves
2012 – Trayvon Martin, age 17, is shot to death in Sanford Florida by self-appointed “neighborhood watchman” George Zimmerman
2013 – Pink’s single “Just Give Me a Reason” featuring Nate Ruess is released
2016 – Greece recalls its ambassador to Austria from Vienna, after being excluded from a meeting of the Balkan states to discuss the refugee crisis. Austria and other Balkan states at the meeting announced limits on the number of refugees they would let in, and a daily cap on the number of asylum claims they will accept, which will make it harder for refugees to continue north into the heart of Europe. Greece has been struggling to handle a massive influx of refugees, mostly from Syria and Iraq, estimating that 20,000 refugees and migrants will be trapped in Greece by the new restrictions. Greek migration minister Yannis Mouzalas declared, “Greece will not become a Lebanon or a warehouse of souls.” Lebanon, with just 4 million citizens, is now hosting over a million refugees from the civil war in Syria
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I always loved “Good King Wenceslas” so here:
Thanks Malisha –
A Good King, concerned with the the welfare of all his people, including the poorest of them. I always wonder why the right-wing Christians so seldom quote from the New Testament.
Trayvon Martin is sometimes described as having had a “confrontation with” his killer (may his name be blotted out of human memory). But I would describe it differently. In the absence of any officially decreed description of what kind of homicide was committed on this youngster, I would say that he was killed by someone who stalked and confronted him. Technically, of course, since his killer confronted him )”What you doin’ around here?” IS a confrontation, he was killed “during a confrontation.” Also, although the killer described himself as a “neighborhood watch volunteer,” he was neither a member of the HOA which had authority to appoint such neighborhood watch volunteers nor an authorized and trained neighborhood watch volunteer. I know this is just a matter of semantics but these things end up affecting how we think about the events in our world.
At the time of the extrajudicial killing of Trayvon Martin, a prominent journalist printed a story almost instantly in the Miami Herald saying that the neighborhood where it took place was a dangerous neighborhood where there had been a lot of crie and, specifically, “one other shooting” during the year preceding Martin’s death. I FOIA’d the police reports for the prior year and dicovered that there had been NO “OTHER SHOOTING” in that previous year; the “shooting” referred to was the killing of Martin himself. I wrote to the journalist and the paper demanding a retraction but by then the sentence containing that LIE had been re-printed in over a thousand other news sources both in print, on-line and cable, broadcast, etc. It sounded already like a chapter and verse of the Bible. It was false. The journalist and the paper refused to correct it. The journalist was thereafter promoted and then went to a larger, more prestigious paper, where she is still, I believe, reporting.
Sometimes when I think back on this event and the aftermath just in my tiny corner of the world with my minuscule resources ($107 for the FOIA), I think bitterly, “My country deserves a liar and an evil, ignorant tyrant like Trump because we have fostered ignorance and evil and lies. As was done to Trayvon Martin will now be done to our hopes for an emerging democracy on so recently-stolen soil.
neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman
It was a travesty of justice from beginning to end, aided and abetted, either deliberately to sell more papers, or out of laziness in not fact-checking, by the reporter at the Miami Herald.
Thanks for trying – a free press isn’t worth a damn if it won’t report accurately.
I have corrected the text for On This Day.
Oops I don’t know how that last phrase at the end of that post crept in there, and I never corrected the word “crie” when I meant “crime.” I guess I just got careless when I began remembering my correspondence with the damned Miami Herald. Sorry for such careless typing.
About the free press, you’re right, and one of the things that was especially egregious was that the police report was easy to interpret. In fact, I was so confused by how easy it was to conclude that this was not a high-crime area I actually phoned the police and got someone on the phone and triple-checked it. I couldn’t believe the mistake was so basic and the REAL report was so clear. I thought I must have read it wrong or something.