April 3rd is

Chocolate Mousse Day

Film Score Day *

Pony Express Day *

National Tweed Day *

Weed Out Hate Day

World Party Day *

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MORE! Oscar Wilde, Sandra Boynton and Allen Ginsberg, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Guinea – Second Republic Day

Serbia – Belgrade: Belgrade Dance
Festival (through April 12)

United Kingdom – Cheltenham:
Cheltenham Town Hall Film Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

686 – Maya king Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ assumes the crown of Calakmul, in an area just north of what is now the Mexican-Guatemalan border

Maya stucco container from era of King Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’

801 – The troops of Louis the Pious, King of the Franks, capture Barcelona from the Moors after a siege of several months

1016 – Xingzong born, Emperor of the Liao dynasty, whose reign began in 1031, when he was 16 years old, and ended with his death at age 39 in 1055. There was much corruption during his reign, and his frequent wars against the Western Xia dynasty and Northern Song dynasty meant high taxes, which made him unpopular, especially since he spent lavishly for his own pleasure

1043 – Edward the Confessor is crowned, one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England

1077 – Holt Roman Emperor Henry IV grants the county of Friuli, in northeast Italy, with ducal status, to Sigaerd, Patriarch of Aquileia, and its first Parliament begins representing the communes as well as the nobility and clergy

1693 – John Harrison born, English clockmaker who invented a marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude at sea; his solution revolutionized navigation

1778 – Pierre-Fidele Bretonneau born, French epidemiologist; first successful tracheotomy

1783 – Washington Irving born, American author

1791 – Anne Lister born, British traveler, diarist and mountaineer; first woman to climb Monte Perdido in the Aragonese Pyrenees and Vignemale, the highest peak in the French Pyrenees; often called the “first modern lesbian” because her wealth allowed her to live openly as a couple with another wealthy heiress, Ann Walker, from 1834 until Lister’s death in 1840; her diaries run to four million words, where the details of her lesbian relationships from her school days on are written in a private code

1807 – Mary Carpenter born, English educational reformer, antislavery activist and feminist, founds a ‘ragged school’ for children of the poor, publishes articles and books on her work that helped in the passage of several education reform acts; first woman whose paper is published by the Statistical Society of London

1817 – Mathilde Franziska Anneke born, German feminist, journalist and newspaper publisher; after emigrating to the United States, she became an abolitionist, started another feminist newspaper and opened a school for girls

1823 – Tweed Day * – William “Boss” Tweed born, crooked New York politician – let’s celebrate the wonderful warm wool cloth from Scotland instead

1829 – James Carrington patents a coffee mill

1836 – Harriet Prescott Spofford born, American author and poet, began writing to earn money when her parents became ill; wrote Gothic romances and detective stories

1860 –First Pony Express * mail delivery service by horse and rider between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California begins; the 1,800 mile run will take 10 days

1861 – White settlers, illegally moving onto Sioux land under treaty in Minnesota, petition President Lincoln for protection from the Indians

1870 – Sara McLaughlin Conboy born, American factory worker and labor organizer, first woman U.S. delegate to the British Trades Union Congress, one of the organizers of the United Textile Workers of America

1876 – Margaret Anglin born in Canada, American stage actress, director, and producer, known for roles in Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, as well as contemporary productions; between 1910 and 1928, she directed, produced and starred in five English-language productions of classical Greek tragedies. She appeared in over 80 plays between 1894 and 1943

1885 – Bud Fisher born, American cartoonist; Mutt and Jeff

1888 – Emma Smith becomes the first victim listed in eleven unsolved brutal murders of women committed in or near the impoverished  Whitechapel district in the East End of London, but her death is markedly different than the others, and it is unlikely she is a victim of the infamous ‘Jack the Ripper‘

1895 –The trial in the libel case brought by Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry begins, but evidence is unearthed of Wilde’s homosexuality, and he is tried for ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years hard labor (1895-1897). During his incarceration, he wrote De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Upon his release, he left immediately for France, where he died destitute in Paris of meningitis in 1900 at the age of 46. In 2017, Oscar Wilde was among the 50,000 men who were pardoned for homosexual acts no longer considered offences under the Policing and Crime Act 2017, known informally as the Alan Turing Act

1898 – Henry R. Luce born, American magazine publisher; Time, LIFE and Sports Illustrated

1903 – Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay born, Indian social reformer, advocate for raising the socio-economic status of Indian women, and freedom fighter; remembered as the driving force behind the renaissance of Indian handicrafts, hand looms, and Indian performing arts. Several Indian cultural institutions exist today because of her influence: the National School of Drama, Sangeet Natak Akademi (a national academy for music, dance and drama), Central Cottage Industries Emporium, and the Crafts Council of India. India’s second-highest civilian honor, Padma Vibhushan, was conferred on her by the Indian government in 1987

1912 – Dorothy Eden born in New Zealand, author, moved to London in 1954, wrote 18 novels in historical and suspense genres; An Important Family

1922 – Joseph Stalin is the USSR’s first General Secretary of the Communist Party

1924 – Doris Day born, American singer, actress, and animal rights activist

1924 – Roza Shanina born, Soviet Sniper, first female sniper to be awarded the Order of Glory; she was killed in action while guarding a severely wounded commander

1928 – Jennifer Paterson born, British chef who co-hosted with Clarissa Dickson Wright the popular BBC TV cooking series, Two Fat Ladies. The series originally ran from 1996 to 1999, but has been repeated frequently on the UK Good Food Channel, in the U.S. on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Paterson also wrote a cookery column for The Spectator

Two Fat Ladies: Jennifer Paterson, left, and Clarissa Dickson Wright 

1934 – Jane Goodall born, British primatologist-anthropologist-ethologist; 45-year study on chimpanzees in Tanzania; founder of the Jane Goodall Institute

1934 – Pamela Allen born, New Zealand children’s book author and illustrator; she has published over 50 picture books; her first book, Mr Archimedes’ Bath, won the 1980 Ethel Turner Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, and Who Sank the Boat? won a 1984 International Board on Books for Young People honour diploma. Eight of her books have been adapted for the stage by the Patch Theatre Company, and performed at the Sydney Opera House

1936 – Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed for the kidnapping and death of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh

1942 – Film Score Day * – the film score for The Jungle Book by Miklós Rózsa is so popular that it becomes the first commercial album of the score of an American film which wasn’t a musical to be released

1943 – Hikaru Saeki born, first woman admiral of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, and first woman to achieve star rank in the JMSDF; she was originally an obstetrician-gynecologist, then joined the JMSDF in 1989. After her service in several military hospitals and medical rooms aboard naval vessels, she became the first woman to head a JSDF hospital in 1997, was promoted to rear admiral in 2001, and retired in 2003

1945 – Doon Arbus born American writer and journalist; she has been collaborator with photographer Richard Avedon, on the books Alice in Wonderland: The Forming of a Company and the Making of a Play, and The Sixties. Doon Arbus has written for Rolling Stone and The Nation. Since her mother, photographer Diane Arbus, committed suicide in 1971, she has managed her mother’s estate, and contributed to several books about her, including Diane Arbus Revelations, and Untitled, which she designed and edited with Yolanda Cuomo

1946 – Hanna Suchocka born, Polish lawyer, politician and diplomat; serves as Polish Ambassador to Malta and the Holy See; first woman Prime Minister of Poland

1946 – Japanese Lt. General Masaharu Homma is executed in the Philippines for leading the Bataan Death March

1948 – U.S. President Truman signs the Marshall Plan, officially the European Recovery Program, authorizing $5 billion to aid 16 countries, including Germany; $40 million dollars have already been given to France, Austria, China and Italy

1948 – Arlette Cousture born, French Canadian historical novelist and screenwriter; noted for Les filles de Caleb (The Daughters of Caleb), which became a Quebec TV series, and Ces Enfants d’ailleurs (These Children from Elsewhere), which was also made into a television series. In 1998, she was made an Office of the Order of Canada

1948 – Jeju Uprising: on Jeju Island, the communist South Korean Labor Party, protesting against national police employed by the U.S. military government and a “national” election to be held only in South Korea, attacks local police and paramilitary groups. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the South Korean government’s response was especially harsh: between 14,000 and 30,000 people, including women and children, were killed. Another 40,000 inhabitants of the island fled to Japan. The facts of the events had been suppressed by the South Korean government through censorship and repression until 2006, when the government formally apologized for its role in the killings

1951 – Annette Dolphin born, British Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology at University College London; a leader in the field of neuronal voltage-gated calcium channels, and focused on the regulation of calcium channel trafficking and function, and the modulation of that function by activation of G-protein coupled receptors. Her work on the control of calcium channel trafficking by auxiliary calcium channel subunits has been particularly influential.  She has received the British Pharmacological Society (BPS) Sandoz Prize and the Pfizer Prize in Biology. Dolphin was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1999, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015

1953 – Sandra Boynton born, American humorist, cartoonist, children’s book author and illustrator, songwriter, director, music producer, and designer og greeting cards, calendars, paper goods, clothing and plush toys. She won the 2008 Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Cartoonists Society’s highest honor

1954 – Elisabetta Brusa born, Italian composer, now a naturalized British citizen; best known for her orchestral works

1955 – The American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl against obscenity charges

1958 – Francesca Woodman born, American photographer, best known for her black-and-white studies of women

1959 – The Coasters song ‘Charlie Brown’ is banned by the BBC because it refers to “throwin’ spitballs,” but it is lifted after 2 weeks

1965 – Nazia Hassan born, Pakistani pop singer-songwriter, lawyer and social activist; widely popular in Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia. Her English-language single “Dreamer Deewane” was the first song by a Pakistani singer to make it on the British charts. Hassan had degrees in economics and law from universities in London. She was a supporter and fundraiser for the Inner Wheel Club of India, an international women’s organization, and an active member of Voice of Women, and the National Youth Organisation. She was a major supporter of mobile medical clinics in the densely populated Lyari Town section of Karachi, raised funds for children in Tharparkar and  Rajasthan, and gave away toys to thousands of poor children. Hassan worked for the United Nations Security Council in 1991-1992, and served as a cultural ambassador for UNICEF in 1993. She died of lung cancer in 2000. The Nazia Hassan Foundation has opened schools to educate street children

1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis TN, the day before he is assassinated

1969 – U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announces plans to “Vietnamize” the war

1973 – Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs

1975 – Bobby Fischer refuses to play in a chess match against Anatoly Karpov, giving Karpov the title of World Champion by default

1980 – Megan Rohrer born, American Evangelical Lutheran pastor, the first openly transgender minister ordained by the church, in 2006. Rohrer has been pastor at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in San Francisco since 2014, and in 2017 became the first LGBTQ chaplain for the San Francisco Police Department. Rohrer is Executive Director of the Welcome ministry to the homeless and hungry, growing and distributing food from community gardens, and an advocate for trans people

1981 – The Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, is unveiled at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco

1991 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 is adopted in an attempt to reduce tensions between Iraq and Kuwait

1995 – World Party Day *: Vanna Bonta’s ‘Quantum Fiction’ novel Flight has a World Party Day, so her fans really start one – “Pass the food and turn up the music”

1996 – “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski is captured at his Montana cabin

2000 – United States v. Microsoft Corp.: Microsoft is ruled to have violated United States antitrust law by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors.

2009 – Iowa’s Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage

2010 – Apple Inc. releases the first generation iPad, a tablet computer

2010 –Utah HS students replicate Van Gogh’s Starry Night with 2 tons of Malt-O-Meal

2016 – The ‘Panama papers’ are leaked, revealing financial and attorney-client information on 214, 488 offshore entities, some of them shell corporations used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions

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