April 26th is

National Audubon Day *

Kids and Pets Day

Lesbian Visibility Day

National Pretzel Day

Richter Scale Day *

World Intellectual Property Day *

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MORE! Natalie Curtis, Charles Richter and Marilyn Nelson, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Belarus and Russia –
Chernobyl Day of Remembrance

Canada – Montréal QC:
Bagel Burlesque Expo

Malaysia – Terengganu: Darul Iman
(Sultan of Terengganu’s birthday)

Tanzania – Union Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

121 – Marcus Aurelius born, Roman Emperor, philosopher and author, the last of the “Five Good Emperors”

757 – Hisham Al-Reda born, second Umayyid Emir of Cordoba, who ruled from 788 to 796. He was forty years old at his death

1478 – The Pazzi family of Florence, wealthy bankers, plot with Francesco Salvati and Girolamo Riario to murder Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano to oust the Medici family as rulers of Florence; Giuliano is killed during mass in the Duomo of Florence, but the wounded Lorenzo escapes, and most of the conspirators are quickly rounded up and summarily executed

1564 – William Shakespeare is baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon in England

1575 – Marie de’ Medici born, Queen consort of France and Navarre, and, after the death of her husband King Henry IV in 1610, regent for her son, King Louis XIII, until he came of age in 1617. She was unpopular in France because she was Italian, from the wealthy and powerful House of Medici, she quarreled openly at court with the King’s many mistresses, and she attempted to get rid of Richelieu. But the fortune she brought to the marriage paid off many of Henry’s debts, financed wars, French exploration in North America, and built the Palais du Lexumbourg

1607 – English colonists make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia

1777 – Sybil Ludington, aged 16, rides 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British regular forces

1785 – John James Audubon born, American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter noted for his extensive studies of American birds and his detailed illustrations of the birds in their natural habitats; The Birds of America

Shore Lark from The Birds of America

1798 – Eugène Delacroix born, French painter and lithographer

La Liberté guidant le peuple, by Eugène Delacroix

1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliary gesture with the factions of the Ancien Régime and to eventually consolidate his own rule

1803 – European scientists become convinced that meteors exist when thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L’Aigle, France

1805 – First Barbary War: U.S. Marines capture Derna, a port city in Libya, after marching 800 kilometers (500 miles) across the Libyan Desert from Alexandria, Egypt

1822 – Frederick Law Olmsted, American landscape architect, social critic and public administrator; co-designer of New York City’s  Central Park

1865 – Near Bowling Green, Virginia, U.S. cavalry troopers corner and kill John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln

1875 – Natalie Curtis born, ethnomusicologist, known for transcribing and publishing traditional music of American Indian tribes and African American music

1886 – ‘Ma’ Rainey born, African-American singer; dubbed ‘mother of the blues’

1888 – Anita Loos born, novelist, screenwriter, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), wrote screenplays for Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, wrote memoirs and Twice Over Lightly with Helen Hayes (1972)

1889 – Ludwig Wittgenstein born in Austria, English philosopher

1898 – Vicente Aleixandre born, Spanish poet and author, Nobel Prize laureate

1900 – Eva Aschoff born, German visual artist, bookbinder and calligrapher; noted for her decorated papers, she had her own bookbinding shop in Freiberg (1928-1964)

1900 – Richter Scale Day * – Charles F. Richter born, inventor of the Richter scale to measure the magnitude of earthquakes

1907 – Julia Godman Ruuttila born, union recruiter, activist and journalist, worked for the CIO’s International Woodworkers of America during the eight-and-a-half-month lock-out in 1937, and raised community support; protested the Vietnam War; still walked in picket lines at 80 despite asthma, ulcers, arthritis and angina

1912 – A.E. van Vogt born, influential Canadian science fiction writer; noted for Slan, The Weapon Makers and The Voyage of the Space Beagle, among many other stories and novels

1914 – Bernard Malamud born, American novelist and short story writer

1916 – Morris West born, Australian author and playwright; The Shoes of the Fisherman

1917 – I.M. Pei born in China, influential American modern architect

I. M. Pei in front of his glass pyramid at the Louvre, Paris

1922 – Jeanne Sauvé, Canadian politician, first woman Governor General of Canada (1984-1990); Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons (1980-1984)

1922 – Margaret Scott born in South Africa, ballet dancer and choreographer; she danced with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1939, then joined the Ballet Rambert (1940-1947), and became a principal dancer in 1943; When the company toured Australia, she chose to remain there when the tour ended. In 1949, Scott was a founding member of Gertrude Johnson’s National Theatre Ballet in Melbourne. After her marriage in the 1950s, she taught classes in ballet, then became the first director of the Australian Ballet School, from 1964 until her retirement in 1990

1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established

1933 – Carol Burnett born, American comedian, actress and producer; best known for her television variety program, the first of its kind hosted by a woman, The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978), which won 23 Emmy awards. She quietly contributed to scholarship programs at UCLA and the University of Hawaii to help people in financial need, to honor a pledge she made to an anonymous donor who financed her trip to New York, where her career began, after she graduated from UCLA in 1954

1935 – Patricia Reilly Giff born, American children’s book author; Lily’s Crossing is a 1998 Newbery Honor Book, Nory Ryan’s Song is a 2003 ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and Pictures of Hollis Woods is a 2003 Newbery Honor Book

1937 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain, is bombed by German Luftwaffe

1942 – Sharon Carstairs born, Canadian Liberal politician; Canadian Senator (1994-2011); Member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba for River Heights (1986-1994); Leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party (1984-1993); Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba (1990-1993 and 1988-1990)

1942 – Jadwiga Staniszkis born, Polish sociologist, political scientist, and academic; during the 1968 Polish political crisis, she was dismissed from her position in the Warsaw University Department of Sociology and arrested for her attendance at student protests against the communist government. The manuscript of her first book was confiscated by the secret service and lost. Her second book, on the Solidarity movement, was originally published in French, and has never been printed in Polish. In 2004, she was awarded the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science, and in 2006, she was honored with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta

1946 – Marilyn Nelson, African American poet, translator and children’s book author; poet laureate of Connecticut (2001-2006)

1948 – International Guide Dogs Day * – International Guiding Eyes founded; 1992, name changed to Guide Dogs of America

Joseph Jones, Sr. with guide dog Lucy, 1957 –
one of the earliest successes

1954 – Tatyana Fomina born, Estonian Women’s Chess Champion, Woman Grandmaster and twice European senior women’s champion 2012 and 2014

1960 – Forced out by the April Revolution, South Korean President Syngman Rhee resigns after twelve years of dictatorial rule

1961 – Joan Chen born in Shanghai, Chinese American actress, film director and producer, and screenwriter; she is best known for her worked as an actress in The Last Emperor and the television series Twin Peaks. She is the producer, director and screenwriter of Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, and Shanghai Strangers, and the director of Autumn in New York. Chen was involved in a Banyan Tree Project campaign to stop HIV/AIDS- related stigma in Asian and Pacific Islander communities, and has promoted the Chinese Pink Ribbon Breast Cancer Prevention campaign, and the Family Violence Prevention Fund

1962 – NASA’s Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon, the first U.S. spacecraft to reach another celestial body. Its planned mission was to collect gamma-ray data in flight, assess radar reflectivity of the moon’s surface, and to transmit pictures of the surface back to Earth for 10 minutes prior to crashing, but the onboard computer failed, and no scientific data was returned to mission control

1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania

1970 – World Intellectual Property Day * – The Convention establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) goes into force

1970 – Kristen Ghodsee born, American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, best known for her work on post-communist Bulgaria, and post-communist gender studies; author of Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism, and Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism

1980: The Blondie single “Call Me” is #1 in the U.S and the UK

1981 – Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center performs the world’s first human open fetal surgery

1984 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan visits China

1986 – A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

1989 – The ‘April 26 Editorial’ is published on the front page of the People’s Daily during the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, calling the student movement as a destabilizing anti-party revolt that should be resolutely opposed at all levels of society. As the first authoritative document from the top leadership on the growing movement, it is interpreted as a ‘no-tolerance’ party policy toward student protesters and their sympathizers. Students are enraged, and even larger numbers come to Tiananmen Square the following day

1996 – Sotheby ends four-day auction of Jackie O stuff, taking in $34.5 million

2000 – Vermont Governor Howard Dean signs the first bill in the U.S. allowing same-sex couples to form civil marriage unions

2005 – Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination

2013 – Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Dhaka, capital city of Bangladesh, where hundreds of workers died when an eight-story building housing four garment factories collapsed. Days after the collapse, rescue workers are still pulling trapped survivors from the wreckage

2018 – American comedian Bill Cosby is convicted on three counts of sexual assault. In September, 2018, he is sentenced to 3-to-10 years in prison, levied a fine of $25,000 plus the costs of prosecution, as well as lifetime classification as a “sexually violent predator” and lifetime registration as a sex offender. His attorneys announce that they will file
an appeal

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