June 30^th is:

Asteroid Day/ Meteor Watch Day *

Disabled Veterans Day

Mai Tai Day

Social Media Day *

National Organization for Women Day *

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MORE! Harold Laski, Assia Djebar and Esa-Pekka Salonen, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Congo Democratic Republic –
Independence Day

Central African Republic –
National Prayer Day

Dominican Republic – Teachers’ Day

France – Paris: Paris Jazz Festival
(ongoing on weekends through July 13)

Guatemala – Armed Forces Day

Israel – Navy Day

Philippines – Friendship with Spain Day

Sudan – Revolution Day
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On This Day in HISTORY

763 – The army of Byzantine Emperor Constantine V defeats the heavy cavalry of Bulgarian Khan Telets, who gave up the high ground and mountain passes to charge down on the Byzantines; there were heavy casualties on both sides, and Constantine executed all his prisoners

Solidus of Constantine V

1520 – Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés fight their way out of Tenochtitlan

1685 – Dominikus Zimmermann born, Bavarian Baroque architect and stuccoist; designs pilgrimage churches at Steinhausen and Wies

Wieskirche (Wies church)

1688 – English nobles, dubbed the Immortal Seven, send a secret message to William II, Prince of Orange, inviting him to topple Catholic King James II of England from his throne, and replace him with William’s Protestant wife Mary, who is the eldest daughter of James; the Englishmen pledge their support for William; in November, William crosses the channel and deposes James in the ‘Glorious Revolution’

William and Mary

1702 – Elizabeth Villin Timothy born in Amsterdam; colonial American printer and newspaper publisher, considered the first woman in America to be a newspaper publisher and the first woman to hold a franchise. When her husband died of Yellow Fever in 1738, she took over running the South Carolina Gazette weekly newspaper, which had been franchised to him by Benjamin Franklin. However, officially the paper’s franchise and management was in the name of her eldest son Peter, who was only 14 at the time of his father’s death. Peter didn’t take over as publisher until he reached his majority at age 21.

1794 – In Ohio, during the ‘Northwest’ Indian War, ‘Blue Jacket’ (the Shawnee War Chief Weyapiersenwah), leads an attack on Fort Recovery, but they are unable to breach the fort’s defenses, held by U.S. Army troops under General Anthony Wayne

1817 – Sir Joseph Hooker born, English botanist and explorer, founder of geographical botany; director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew (1865-1885); Royal Society fellow; his greatest botanical work is the seven-volume Flora of British India

1860 – Oxford Evolution Debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History

1864 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln grants Yosemite Valley to California for “public use, resort and recreation”

1868 – Mabel Cratty born, American social worker, educator and General Secretary of the National Board of the Y.W.C.A. (1906-1928); also a member of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (CCCW); worked as teacher, then a high school principal in Ohio (1890-1904)

1883 – Dorothy Tilly born, American civil rights activist, worked to reform southern race relations

1886 – The first transcontinental train trip across Canada departs from Montreal, arriving in Port Moody, British Columbia on July 4th

1893 – Harold Laski born, English political scientist, educator and writer

1899 – Margaret Byrd Rawson born, educator and researcher, identified and treated reading disorders including dyslexia

1905 – Albert Einstein sends the article “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” in which he introduces special relativity, for publication in Annalen der Physik

1906 – U.S. Congress passes the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act

1908 – Meteor Watch Day * – A meteor explosion in Siberia knocked down trees in a 40-mile radius and struck people unconscious some 40 miles away

1912 – María Luisa Dehesa Gómez Farías born, Mexican architect who worked for almost 50 years for the Public Works Department in the Federal District of Mexico City, primarily designing housing, both single-family and apartment buildings; the first Mexican woman to graduate with a degree in architecture; joint winner with Mexico’s first woman civil engineer, Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza, of the Ruth Rivera Prize for their contributions to the city

1914 – Mohandas Gandhi sends General Jan Smuts a gift – a pair of sandals he made while serving a prison sentence for campaigning for Indian rights in South Africa; in July, Gandhi and his wife set sail for England, his campaign successfully completed

Gandhi, 1906 – London

1917 – Lena Horne born, singer. actress, civil rights activist, first African American woman to sign long-term Hollywood contract, fought for contractual guarantees that African Americans could attend her shows, Worked with Eleanor Roosevelt for passage of anti-lynching laws. During WWII, U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, so she appeared before a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing black soldiers had been seated in the back rows, she walked off the stage to where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. Blacklisted in 1950s for her affiliations with “communist-backed” groups. She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, just days before Evers was assassinated. She spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, and the National Council of Negro Women

1918 – Prominent US Socialist and Pacifist Eugene V. Debs is arrested on charges of denouncing the government, a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917

1920 – Eleanor Ross Taylor born, American poet; published six collections of poetry between 1960 and 2009; won the 1998 Shelley Memorial Award, the 2010 William Carlos Williams Award for her book Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems 1960-2008, and the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement

1921 – U.S. President Warren G. Harding appoints former President William Howard Taft Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

1933 – Joan Murrell Owens born, African-American marine biologist, noted for her research on corals at the Smithsonian Institution; before getting her doctorate in marine biology, she designed programs for teaching English to educationally disadvantaged students, which was a model for the Upward Bound program of the U.S. Department of Education

1934 – The Night of the Long Knives: Adolf Hitler violently purges his political rivals in extrajudicial executions which give him an absolute hold on power in Germany

1936 – Margaret Mitchell’s sweeping romance novel, Gone With the Wind, is published; it sells 176,000 copies in 1936; by the end of 1938, over 1 million copies are sold

1936 – Assia Djebar born, pseudonym of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, Algerian Maghreb author, translator, feminist and filmmaker, one of North Africa’s most influential writers: 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Yourcenar Prize, and German Book Trade Peace Prize; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, A Sister to Scheherazade

1937 – World’s first emergency telephone number, 999, is introduced in London

1940 – Patricia “Pat” Schroeder born, American politician, first woman to represent Colorado in U.S. House of Representatives, serving 12 terms. First woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee. A tireless advocate on work-family issues, she was a prime mover behind the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and the 1985 Military Family Act

1943 – Florence Ballard born, American singer and recording artist, founding member of The Supremes, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously

1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan

1958 – Esa-Pekka Salonen born, Finnish conductor and composer; Principal Conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra since 2006

1960 – The musical Oliver! Premieres in London’s West End

1961 – Lynne G. Jolitz born, American computer scientist and programmer; pioneer in open source operating systems with 386BSD; co-founder of several Silicon Valley start-up companies with her husband; noted authority on operating systems and networking, and holds patents in internet technologies and semiconductor memory innovations; author of numerous technical papers and articles

1966 – The National Organization for Women, which will become the largest U.S. feminist organization, begins organizing immediately, led by Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Pauli Murray, Gloria Steinem and 16 other women who had met the night before in Friedan’s hotel room

1967 – Victoria Kaspi born in the U.S., American-Canadian astrophysicist whose research primarily concerns neutron stars and pulsars; Professor of Astrophysics at McGill University since 1999; Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research; in 2016, she became the first woman to be honored with the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, and also appointed as a companion of the Order of Canada

1971 – The 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which lowers the minimum voting age to 18, is ratified as Ohio becomes the 38th state to approve it

1971 – In New York Times Co. v. United States, U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, rules The New York Times and The Washington Post may resume immediate publication of articles based on the secret Pentagon Papers about origins of the Vietnam War

1972 – The first Leap Second is added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system

1986 – U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states can outlaw  homosexual acts between consenting adults; the Supreme Court explicitly overturns  Bowers in 2003 in its decision in Lawrence v. Texas, that adult consensual sexual intimacy in one’s home is a vital interest in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14^th Amendment

1986 – Madonna releases her True Blue album

1990 – East and West Germany merge their economies

1992 – UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali meets with African National Congress (ANC) President Nelson Mandela in Dakar. They discussed possible involvement of the international community in investigating violence in South Africa and convening of the Security Council on this issue

1996 – Bahia Bakari born, French survivor of the 2009 crash of Yemenia Flight 626, in which the other 152 people onboard were killed, including  Bakari’s mother. She could barely swim, and had no life vest, but clung to a piece of aircraft wreckage for over nine hours in heavy seas, most of it in pitch darkness, before being rescued. Bakari was hailed as “the miracle girl” in the French press, and was rushed by a French government jet to Paris. At the hospital, she spent three weeks recovering from treatment and surgery for a fractured pelvis and collarbone, burns to her knees, cuts, bruises and exhaustion.  In 2010, she was the co-author with French journalist Omar Guendouz of the story of her ordeal, Moi Bahia, la miraculée (I’m Bahia, the miracle girl)

1997 – The UK transfers sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China

2004 – The international Cassini spacecraft enters Saturn’s orbit after a nearly seven-year journey

2005 – Spain legalizes same-sex marriage

2010 – The first Social Media Day *

2013 –  Protests begin around Egypt against President Mohamed Morsi and the ruling Freedom and Justice Party, sparking their overthrow by a coup d’état in July led by Egyptian army chief General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

2019 – German Captain Carola Rackete, of the Sea-Watch 3, risked going to jail for forcing her way into the Italian port of Lampedusa with 40 immigrants crowded aboard.The Sea-Watch 3, which is sponsored by an NGO, had rescued the migrants off the coast of Libya 17 days earlier. They were finally allowed to disembark at Lampedusa and taken to a reception centre as they prepared to travel to either France, whose interior ministry said it would take in 10 of them, or to Germany, Finland, Luxembourg or Portugal. The Italian coastguard seized the rescue boat, anchoring it just off the coast. Rackete, who was placed under house arrest, had to appear before a judge in the Sicilian town of Agrigento to answer charges of abetting illegal immigration and forcing her way past a military vessel that tried to block the Sea-Watch 3. The latter crime is punishable by three to 10 years in jail. Her arrest prompted a fundraising appeal launched by two prominent German TV stars, which raised over €350,000 (£314,000). Rackete became a hero to the Italian left-wing for challenging the “closed-ports” policy of the far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who tweeted, “Mission accomplished. Law-breaking captain arrested. Pirate ship seized, maximum fine for foreign NGO.” Rackete said, “I didn’t have the right to obey. They were asking me to take them [the migrants] back to Libya. From a legal standpoint, these were people fleeing a country at war [and] the law bars you from taking them back there.” Rackete was released from house arrest July 2 after a court ruling that she had broken no laws and acted to protect her passengers’ safety

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