June 29^th is:

Almond Buttercrunch Day

Camera Day

Waffle Iron Day

World Scleroderma Day *

International Mud Day *

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MORE! Julia Lathrop, Paul Klee and  Ellen Kuzwayo, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Ecuador – Engineers Day

Fiji – National Sports Day

French Polynesia – Autonomy Day

Italy, Malta, Peru, Switzerland and Vatican City –
Feasts of St. Peter and St. Paul

Netherlands – Veterans’ Day

Spain – Haro, La Rioja: Battala dos Vinos
(St. Peter’s Day Battle of the Wines)

Seychelles – National Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

226 – China’s Three Kingdoms period: Cao Pi, Emperor of Wei (220-226) dies, and Cao Rui becomes Emperor (226-239)

Emperors Cao Rui (left) and Cao Pi

512 – A solar eclipse is recorded by a monastic chronicler in Ireland

1444 – George Castriot, known as Skanderbeg, an Albanian military commander, defeats an Ottoman invasion force at Torvioll

1504 – Jacques Cartier reaches Prince Edward Island in Canada

1596 – Go-Mizunoo born, became Emperor of Japan (1611-1629) at age 16, when his father, Emperor Go-Yōzei abdicated. In 1629, Go-Mizunoo renounced the throne in favor of his daughter Okiko, who became Empress Meishō, and he went into exile

1613 – Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre burns down

1748 – Giacomo Leopardi born, Italian poet, scholar and philosopher; noted for his lyrical poetry

1767 – British Parliament approves the Townshend Revenue Acts, imposing import duties on glass, lead, paint, paper and tea shipped to America

1787 – Lavinia Stoddard born, American poet and co-founder with her husband, Dr. William Stoddard, of an academy (1812-1818) in the village of Troy, New York, before she contracted consumption (tuberculosis). She and her husband went to Alabama, hoping the warmer climate would restore her health, but she died in 1820. Her best-known poem is “The Soul’s Defiance”

1818 – Pietro Angelo Secchi born, Italian Jesuit and astronomer; Director of the Observatory of the Roman College (later the Pontifical Gregorian University); pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy, one of the first scientists to state authoritatively our Sun is a star; compiled data on over 10,000 binary stars, discovered three comets, and made maps and illustrations of his observations of the moon and Mars

1835 – Celia Thaxter born, American poet and short story writer; she was married at sixteen. During a period of separation from her husband, she returned to her father’s hotel, the Appledore House, in the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine in 1861, where she was the hotel’s hostess, welcoming notable literary figures of the day like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, and Sarah Orne Jewett, and artists William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam. Her first book of poems, Driftwood, was published in 1879, when she also reunited with her husband, moving into a house they had built at Kittery Point, Maine. She died suddenly in 1894, while on a visit to Appledore House; noted for Among the Isles of Shoals, several poetry collections, and her account of “A Memorable Murder” that happened when she was present on nearby Smuttynose Island

1858 – George Goethals born, U.S. Army engineer, directed Panama Canal construction

1858 – Julia Lathrop born, American social reformer, activist and civil servant; met Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr at school, later worked with them and others at Hull House; first woman member appointed to Illinois State Board of Charities, where she advocated for improving social services, and introduced reforms like appointing women doctors to positions in state hospitals, and moving the insane out of state workhouses.   She was appointed by President Taft as the first woman to head a United States federal bureau, as first bureau chief of the newly formed United States Children’s Bureau (1912-1922), where she directed research into child labor, infant mortality, maternal mortality, juvenile delinquency, mothers’ pensions and illegitimacy, and not only created child welfare policy but implemented it, one of the earliest opportunities for an American woman to have a active role in government policy-making and creation of regulations

1868 – George Ellery Hale born, American astronomer; developed the Hale telescope, a
200-inch reflector at Palomar Observatory near San Diego; pioneer in solar physics, discovered magnetic fields in sunspots

1871 – Luisa Tetrazzini born, Italian coloratura soprano, very popular in Europe and America from 1890 through the 1920s

1880 – France annexes Tahiti

1881 – In the Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, a Nubian religious leader, was proclaimed the Mahdi, the messianic redeemer of the Islamic faith, by his followers. Egyptian authorities sent a military expedition to arrest him for inciting the Sudanese people, but the expedition was ambushed and nearly annihilated by followers of the Mahdi, and the rebellion spread

1886 – James VanDerZee born, African-American photographer, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance

James VanDerZee, portrait by Irving Penn

1885 – Virginia Pope born, American Fashion Editor

1888 – Professor Frederick Treves performs first appendectomy in England

1893 – Helen Elna Hokinson born, American cartoonist; contributed 68 covers and over 1,800 cartoons to The New Yorker

1897 – Kazue Togasaki born, survivor of 1906 San Francisco earthquake, physician who pioneered a place in American medicine for women of Japanese ancestry, one of the few physicians (general practitioner and obstetrician) allowed to practice medicine in the Japanese Internment Camps during World War II

1900 – Antoine Saint-Exupery born, French aviator and author; The Little Prince

1908 – Leroy Anderson born, American conductor, arranger and composer

1910 – Frank Loesser born, American composer, librettist and lyricist

1911 – Bernard Hermann born, American composer; noted for scores of many of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films

1914 – Nnoseng Ellen Kuzwayo born, South African women’s rights activist, teacher (1938-1952) and politician. Her first husband was abusive, and the marriage ended in divorce. She married Godfrey Kuzwayo in 1950, and worked as a teacher in the Transvaal until the introduction of the Bantu Education Act in 1953. She trained as a social worker (1953-1955). After the 1976 Soweto uprising, she was the only woman on the Soweto committee of 10 organizers, and was president of the BlackConsumer Union and the Maggie Magaba Trust. Her activism led to her being detained for 5 months in 1977 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Her autobiography, Call Me Woman, was published in 1985. Kuzwayo was the first black South African to win the country’s leading literary prize, the Central News Agency Literary Award. She was elected as a member of South Africa’s first multiracial Parliament, and served from 1994 to 1999, then retired at age 84

1916 – Ruth Warrick born, American actress and political activist, best known for playing Phoebe Tyler Wallingford on All My Children (1970-2005). She made her film debut in Citizen Kane in 1941. She was a member of the Democratic Party, and worked with the administrations of John F. Kennedy,  Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter on labor and education issues. She was a strong opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In 2000, she turned down a lifetime achievement award from the South Carolina Arts Commission after the state legislators decided, as a compromise, to move the Confederate flag from the state Capitol dome to a spot on the grounds. Warrick, a lifelong supporter of African-American civil rights, commented, “In my view, this was no compromise. It was a deliberate affront to the African-Americans, who see it as a sign of oppression and hate.” 

Ruth Warrick in the 1940s

1920 – Nicole Russell born, Duchess of Bedford, author and producer, one of the first female television producers in France

1920 – Ray Harryhausen born, influential American-British pioneer in Dynamation, a stop-motion model form of film animation; noted for the first film version of Mighty Joe Young, The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts

1927 – Marie Thérèse Killens born, Canadian Liberal Party member of the House of Commons of Canada (1979-1988)

1929 –Oriana Fallaci born, Italian journalist and author, frequently covered war and revolution; her book Interview with History contains interviews with world leaders

1930 – Viola Léger born in America, Canadian actress and Canadian Liberal Party Senator (2001-2005); Officer of the Order of Canada (1989); Governor General’s Performing Arts Award (2013)

1940 – Paul Klee, Swiss German artist, dies at age 60, after suffering for many years from scleroderma – World Scleroderma Day * is on June 29 in remembrance of Klee

Sans Titre (Deux poissons, un hameçon, un ver) by Paul Klee

1942 – Charlotte Bingham born, English novelist and television scriptwriter; known mainly for historical romance novels, and scripts for the series Upstairs, Downstairs

1945 – Chandrika Kumaratunga born, Sri Lankan politician; inaugural Chair of the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation since 2015; first woman President of Sri Lanka (1994-2005); Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (1994); Sri Lanka Freedom Party leader (1994-2006); Member of Parliament (1994); Chief Minister of the Western Province (1993-1994)

1949 – Anne Veneman born, American lawyer and Republican public servant; Executive Director of UNICEF (2005-2010); first woman appointed as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (2001-2005), after previously serving as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture (1991-1993); Deputy Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity Programs (1989-1991); Associate Administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (1986-1989)

1953 – The Federal Highway Act authorizes construction of 42,500 miles of freeway

1966 – Twenty women pack into Betty Friedan’s hotel room in Washington D.C. during the EEOC Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women. Friedan writes ‘N.O.W.’ on a paper napkin, and they form the National Organization for Women, with an initial budget of $135.00

1966 EEOC Conference attendees – Betty Friedan is first on the right

1968 – Pink Floyd releases their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets

1972 – U.S. Supreme Court rules in the case Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth  Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment

1974 – Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with the Kirov Ballet

1987 – Vincent Van Gogh’s “Le Pont de Trinquetaille” auctioned for $20.4 million

1992 – U.S. Supreme Court is divided in Planned Parenthood v Casey. It upholds part of Roe v Wade, but overturns its trimester framework which completely banned the states from regulating abortion in the first trimester, and limited regulations in the second trimester to those which would protect a woman’s health. They redraw the lines of increasing state interest, and weaken the 14^th Amendment protection, replacing it with the  vague “undue burden” standard: “An undue burden exists and therefore a provision of law is invalid if its purpose or effect is to place substantial obstacles in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.”  This has opened the flood gates of state regulations and legislation which have to be challenged one by one, burdening the federal courts, costing millions in states’ budget dollars to defend, and usually ending with a finding of unconstitutionality against the states

1993 – Aerosmith releases “Cryin’”

1995 – Shuttle Atlantis and Mir space station form largest man-made orbiting satellite

2006 – U.S. Supreme Court rules in Hamdan v Rumsfeld that the Bush Administration plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates both U.S. and  international law

2007 –Apple’s iphone goes on sale for $599 – the price is lowered to $399 for the Christmas season

2009 – International Mud Day * is sponsored by the World Forum Foundation, launched in 1998, a non-profit which connects early childhood professionals around the world for an exchange of ideas at an annual World Forum on Early Care and Education, and now sponsors Global Leaders for Young Children, a program of training and financial support for promising educators to develop projects in their home countries

2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff receives a 150-year sentence for his fraudulent Ponzi scheme, estimated at $64.8 billion as of November 2008

2016 – U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter lifts Pentagon’s ban on transgendered people serving in the U.S. armed forces

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