July 7^th is:

Strawberry Sundae Day

World Chocolate Day *

Tell the Truth Day

Save the Dive Bar Day

Father-Daughter Take a Walk Day

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MORE! Nettie Stevens, Marc Chagall and Margaret Walker,  click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Brazil – São Paulo:
VillaMix Festival

Chile – Santiago:
Vibration Festival

Italy – Lucca:
Lucca Summer Festival

Japan – Tanabata
(Star Festival)

Kenya – Nairobi:
The Koroga Festival

Malaysia – George Town, Penang:
World Heritage City Day

Solomon Islands –
Independence Day

Tanzania – Maonyesho ya Saba Saba
(Dar es Salaam trade fair)

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On This Day in HISTORY

1124 – Venetian Crusade: After over four months of siege, the city of Tyre had fallen to the Venetian Crusaders and their Fleet, led by the militant Doge of Venice, Domenico Michiel; now the Republic of Venice wrests major trade concessions from the city

1053 – Emperor Shirakawa born, Emperor of Japan from 1073 to 1087; he ascended the  Chrysanthemum Throne at the age of 20, and retired to a monastery at age 34, but continued to wield considerable influence over his son and grandsons who were his successors. He was the first emperor to exert what would later be called ‘cloistered rule.’

1456 – Joan d’Arc is retried, acquitted of heresy – 25 years after her death

1520 – Spanish Conquest of the Aztecs, Battle of Otumba: The consquistadors of Hernán Cortés and their allies, the Tlaxcaltec, who were subjugated enemies of the Aztec empire, turn an exhausted retreat from Tenochtitlan, the main city of the Aztecs, into a decisive victory over a vast Aztec army. The Castilian cavalry broke through the Aztecs lines, opening the way for the Castilian rodeleros (sword and shield bearers) and the Tlaxcalan infantry, the slaying of the Aztec leader Matlatzinati, and capture of the Aztec battle-standard, leading to the rout of the much larger Aztec force

1550 – World Chocolate Day * – traditional date for Chocolate’s arrival in Europe

Poseidon Taking Chocolate to Europe – frontispiece to Chocolata Inda,
by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma – 1644

1585 – The Treaty of Nemours is signed by the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici, acting for the French King Henry III, under pressure by members of the Catholic League, and representatives of the House of Guise, including the Duke of Lorraine. The treaty cancelled all previous edicts granting religious tolerance, dismissed all Huguenots from official office, and was the King’s capitulation to the Catholic League’s demands. It gave direct control of the entire northeastern half of France to Henry I, Duc de Guise, who was the founder of the Catholic League. This would lead to the War of the Three Henrys (1587-1589): French King Henry III, Duc de Guise Henry I, and King Henry of Navarre (later King of France).  The War of the Three Henrys was the eighth outbreak of the French Wars of Religion, which were on-again, off-again for 36 years, from 1562 to 1598

1752 – Joseph-Marie Jacquard born, French inventor of the Jacquard loom

1753 – Great Britain’s Parliament passes the British Museum Act 1753, authorizing the purchase of the Collection of Sir Hans Sloane, and later the Harleian Manuscripts Collection, and the Cottonian Library; also establishing “one general repository” for them, now one of the largest museums in the world, with 990,000 sq. ft (92,000 meters)

The original home of the British Museum – Montagu House,
drawing by Sutton Nichols – published 1754

1801 – Toussaint L’Ouverture declares Haitian independence

1802 – “The Wasp” is published, a sheet attacking U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, under the pseudonym “Robert Rusticoat” but written by Harry Croswell, a supporter of John Adams and the Federalists, to counter Jefferson supporter Charles Holt’s paper, The Bee.  In 1804, a criminal case, The People of the State of New York v. Harry Croswell, accuses Croswell of slandering public officials. His attorney, Anthony Hamilton, argues successfully that truthful statements should never be considered defamatory, even if aimed at the President of the United States. In 1805, the New York legislature writes Hamilton’s argument into law

1831 – Jane Elizabeth Conklin born, American poet, religious writer and elocutionist; an early president of the Women’s Relief Corps of the Grand Army of the Republic, a women’s auxiliary group that sought to perpetuate the memory of the service of the Grand Army of the Republic during the American Civil War, and to honor the fallen of the GAR

1846 – U.S. annexation of California is proclaimed at Monterey after the Mexican garrison surrenders

1851 – Lillien J. Martin born, American psychologist, author of over 12 books, including Salvaging Old Age, and Sweeping the Cobwebs; graduated from Vassar in 1880; refused admission to the University of Bonn because of her gender, she studied at the University of Göttingen (1894-1898). Martin taught psychology at Stanford University (1899-1916). In 1913, the University of Bonn awarded her an honorary doctorate. After she left Stanford, Martin became a consulting psychologist and psychopathologist in San Francisco, where she was the head of the world’s first mental health clinic specifically for elderly people and non-handicap children. She was president of the California Society for Mental Hygiene

1852 – Vera Nikolayevna Figner born, Russian revolutionary, doctor’s assistant; participant in the assassination plot against Alexander II, tried and sentenced to death, but sentence commuted to Siberian penal servitude; wrote Memories of a Revolutionist

1860 – Gustav Mahler born, Austrian composer and conductor

1861 – Nettie Stevens born, an early American geneticist; described the XY chromosome system in 1905, correcting and adding to the findings of Edmund Beecher Wilson, showing the significance of Y chromosomes in sex determination. After he made further experiments which confirmed her results, Wilson updated and reissued his earlier 1905 paper, with the new information, and acknowledging her discoveries, but many textbooks only credited Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan (her graduate course instructor, who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to chromosome research) with her discoveries. Wilson and Morgan were invited to speak at a conference to present their theories in 1906, but Stevens was not asked. She published about 40 papers before she died of breast cancer at age 50 in 1912. Thomas Hunt Morgan wrote an extensive obituary for the journal Science, “Her single-mindedness and devotion, combined with keen powers of observation; her thoughtfulness and patience, united to a well-balanced judgment, account, in part, for her remarkable accomplishment”

1863 – First U.S. military draft – exemptions can be bought for $300

1865 – Mary Surratt, conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is hanged with three co-conspirators, becomes the first woman to be executed in the U.S.

1867 – Charlotte Anita Whitney, American social worker, Communist Labor Party organizer, pacifist and suffragist; defendant in the 1920 ‘Criminal Syndicalism’ trial, Whitney v. California, charged with being a member of an organization that was illegal under California law because of its association with the international Communist movement – noted for a landmark U.S. Supreme Court concurring opinion by Justice Louis Brandeis that only a “clear and present danger” would be sufficient for the legislative restriction of the right of free speech: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.” Whitney’s conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court, but she was later pardoned by the Governor of California, and the Supreme Court explicitly overruled Whitney v. California in the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling in 1969

1887 – Marc Chagall born in Belarus, French painter, printmaker and designer

Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait -1914

1889 – Constance Nothard born, South African nursing sister who served with distinction in the South African Military Service during WWI, and was awarded the Croix de Recompense for her service in France. On 1961, Nothard received the first Gold Medal of the South African Nursing Association in recognition of distinguished and exceptional service in times of war and peace, and was also awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal by the International Red Cross. The Library at the South African Nursing Association headquarters in Pretoria is named the C.A. Nothard Library

International Red Cross Florence Nightingale Medal

1904 – Simone “Simca” Beck born, French cooking instructor and cookbook author who collaborated with Julia Child on Mastering the Art of French Cooking

1905 –  Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin born, French mathematician; the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics in France; expert in fluid dynamics and abstract algebra; author of textbooks on lattice theory and abstract algebra, and a history,  Portraits of women mathematicians

1906 – Satchel Paige born, American baseball player, Negro League pitching star and rookie major-league baseball pitcher at age 42

1907 – The first Ziegfeld Follies opens

1907 – Robert Heinlein born, American science-fiction writer; known for Stranger in a Strange Land, and Time Enough for Love

1910 – Doris McCarthy born, Canadian painter of landscapes and Arctic icebergs

Antarctica from the Heights by Doris McCarthy, 1991

1911 – US-Great Britain-Japan-Russia North Pacific Fur Seal Convention bans open-water seal hunting, first international treaty for wildlife preservation

1915 – Margaret Walker born, African American novelist and poet, part of the Chicago Black Renaissance; noted for her poem For My People, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, making her the first black woman to win a U.S. national literary prize, and for her novel Jubilee

1924 – Natalia Bekhtereva born, Russian neuroscientist and psychologist; founding director of the Institute for Human Brain, a branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, did studies measuring the impulse activity of human neurons

1924 – Mary Ford born, American singer-guitarist, performed with husband, Les Paul

1928 – The first sliced bread is sold by Chillicothe Baking Company of Missouri

1929 – Helen Rodríguez Trías born, pediatrician, educator, Puerto Rican nationalist, and women’s rights activist. She joined the student faction of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party at the University of Puerto Rico (BA 1957, Medical Degree 1960). During her residency at University Hospital in San Juan, she established the first center for newborn care in Puerto Rico, where the death rate for newborns decreased 50% within the first three years. She was the first Hispanic president of the American Public Health Association.  In the mid-1960s, when 65% of sterilization procedures in U.S. hospitals were performed on women of color, who were less than 7% of the overall population, she co-founded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA), which became the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA).  Rodríguez Trías was also a founding member of the Women’s Caucus of the American Public Health Association, and the recipient of the Presidential Citizen’s Medal. Her work helped to expand the range of public health services for women and children in minority and low-income populations around the world

1930 – Construction begins on Boulder Dam on the Colorado River – name will be changed to Hoover Dam in 1947

1940 – Richard Starkey born in Liverpool, England – future Beatles drummer Ringo Starr

1944 – Glenys Kinnock born, Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, British teacher, Labour politician and human rights advocate; Lord Temporal Member of the House of Lords since 2009; Minister of State for Africa and the United Nations (2009-2010); Minister of State for Europe (2009); Member of the European Parliament for Wales (1999-2009); Member of the European Parliament for South Wales East (1994-1999). She is a patron and/or board member of a number of charitable organizations, including Womankind Worldwide, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, Freedom from Torture, and Snap Cymru, a Welsh children’s charity. Kinnock is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

1945 – Adele Goldberg born, American computer scientist who was a member of the team that developed the programming language Smalltalk-80; she was also a developer of various object-oriented programming concepts and graphically based user interfaces; president of the Association for Computing Machinery (1984-1986), and co-recipient of the 1987 ACM Software Systems Award

1949 – Shelley Duvall born, American actress, writer and producer; noted for producing and starring in Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-1987); supporter of animal welfare

1954 – WHBQ Memphis is first radio station to play Elvis Presley – ‘That’s All Right’

1965 – Otis Redding records “Respect”

1965 – Mo Collins born as Maureen Collins, American comedian; noted her work on Mad TV (1998-2004), and her work as a voice actress. She was diagnosed in 2011 with gastrointestinal stromal tumor, a rare form of cancer, and is currently in remission, and relates her story to raise awareness of the disease

1967 – The Beatles release “All You Need is Love”

1972 – Susan Lynn Roley and Joanne E. Pierce, the first two women FBI special agents, are sworn in (The first woman agent was Emma Hotchkiss Jentzer, who was hired by the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, in 1911. J. Edgar Hoover, first and longest-serving director of the FBI, will initiate a policy of not hiring women, and fire women already working as agents

1977 – Styx releases their album The Grand Illusion

1980 – Sharia Law is instituted in Iran; women judges were removed first, but by early 1982, the entire pre-Revolutionary judiciary had been purged, their duties replaced by “Revolutionary Tribunals” set up in every town, but overseen by inexperienced and often incompetent judges, with no appeals. In 1982, a more regular court system was reinstated, but with male judges trained in Islamic law, and the Revolutionary Tribunals now handling cases of “national Security” and “anti-revolutionary” crimes

1981 – Sandra Day O’Connor nominated to be first woman on U.S. Supreme Court

1983 – Samantha Smith, a 12-year-old American schoolgirl, flies to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Secretary General Yuri Andropov after she writes a letter to him. She travels as a Goodwill Ambassador making a plea for peace. In 1985, she is killed in a plane crash

1986 – Anahit “Ana” Kasparian born, American political pundit, university lecturer and author; Raw Story columnist; best known for co-hosting and producing the online news show The Young Turks, and as a host on The Point at the TYT Network; outspoken critic of private and for-profit prisons; advocate for campaign finance reform, affordable housing, public education and free speech

1987 – Lt. Col. Oliver North begins his testimony at the Iran-Contra hearing, telling Congress that he had “never carried out a single act, not one” without authorization

1992 – New York Court of Appeals overturns a conviction of two women for exposing their breasts in public; rules women have the same right as men to go topless in public

2007 – The New “Seven Wonders of the World” are announced:  The Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal in India, Petra in Jordan, the Chichen Itza Mayan site in Mexico, Machu Picchu in Peru, and the Colosseum in Rome

2011 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the final movie based on J.K. Rowling’s wizard fantasy books, debuts in London

2017 – Tesla’s long-awaited mass-market electric car, the Model 4, begins rolling off the assembly line

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