August 6th is

Fresh Breath Day

Hiroshima Day *

Root Beer Float Day

Wiggle Your Toes Day

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MORE! Elizabeth Robins, Leo Carrillo and Michelle Yeoh, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Christianity – Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus

Bolivia – Independence Day

El Salvador – San Salvador: Celebración del Divino Salvador del Mundo (Christ’s transfiguration)

France – Lorient: Festival Interceltique
(Celtic cultural festival, through Aug-11-2019)

Jamaica – Independence Day

Japan – Hiroshima: Peace Memorial Ceremony
and Peace Message Lantern Floating *

Russia – Russian Railway Troops Day

United Arab Emirates – Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan
Al Nahyan’s Accession Day (UAE founder)

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On This Day in HISTORY

135 – Bar Kokhba Revolt, Fall of Betar: The city of Betar (in what is now the West Bank area of Israel), stronghold of the Jewish rebels against the Roman Empire, falls to Hadrian’s troops after a siege which lasted over three years, and the inhabitants, including women and children, are massacred

1538 – Bogotá, Columbia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiméniez de Quesada

Primatial Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Bogotá

1572 – Fakhr-al-Din ibn Maan born, Druze Ma’ani Emir and early leader of the Mount Lebanon Emirate, a self-governed area under the Ottoman Empire. He sought to unite Lebanon under his rule, and seek independence from the Ottoman Empire, but the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV eventually tired of this troublesome vassal, and ended his dynastic dreams by executing him with at least one of his sons

1619 – Barbara Strozzi born, Italian Baroque singer and composer, one of the few women of the day to have her compositions published during her lifetime, which were mostly secular vocal music. She may also be the author of some of the lyrics put to her music

1664 – Johann Christoph Schmidt born, German composer and organist

1697 – Nicola Salvi born, Italian sculptor-architect; Rome’s Trevi Fountain designer

1774 – Shaker Founder ‘Mother’ Ann Lee and a small group of her followers arrive in New York from Great Britain, where she had been arrested and jailed multiple times

1787 – Sixty proof sheets of the U.S. Constitution are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia PA

1809 – Alfred Tennyson born, British Poet Laureate (1850-1892);  in 1884 Queen Victoria elevated him to Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, styled as Alfred, Lord Tennyson; the first poet raised to a British peerage for his writing

1817 – Zerelda Wallace born, American lecturer, temperance advocate and suffragist, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on women’s suffrage

1819 – Norwich University is founded in Northfield, Vermont as the first private military school in the U.S.

1825 – Bolivia splits off from Peru, gains independence from Spain

1828 – Andrew Taylor Still is born, American founder of osteopathy

1848 – Susie King Taylor born, African-American U.S. Civil War nurse, author and educator; she was born as a slave on a Georgia plantation, but allowed as a 7-year-old child to live with her grandmother in Savannah, where she learned to read and write in an illegal school run by Mrs. Woodhouse, a free black woman, and then extended her education with the help of two white youths, who knowingly broke the law against teaching slaves. But she was returned to her mother after her grandmother was arrested at a church meeting for singing freedom hymns. The Union took the area not long after, and she went with her uncle’s family under Union protection, eventually arriving at St. Simon’s Island in 1962. The commanding officers, discovering she was literate, offered the 14-year-old Susie a position running a school for children and adults. That same year, she married Edward King, a noncommissioned officer with the unit she would serve as an unpaid volunteer, the first black U.S. Army nurse. During the next three years, she also taught several of the soldiers to read and write.  In 1866, she and her husband returned to Savannah, but he died there in an accident a few months later. She became the first African-American to teach former slaves openly in Georgia, where she taught children during the day and adults at night, but was not able to earn enough from teaching, and worked as a laundress at a military camp. By the 1870s, she was working as a domestic servant, and traveled to Boston with the family that employed her. There she met Russell L. Taylor, who became her second husband in 1879, and she settled in Boston for the rest of her life. In the 1890s, she wrote her memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, the only record by an African American woman of her experiences during the Civil War to be published (privately) in 1902. She died in 1912, at the age of 64

1861 – The United Kingdom annexes Lagos, Nigeria

1862 – Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering catastrophic engine failure near Baton Rouge, LA

1862 – Elizabeth Robins born, American playwright, actress, novelist, and campaigner for woman suffrage who lived most of her adult life in England. She married a fellow actor in 1885, but he resented her greater success as an actress, and her refusal to leave the stage. In 1887, he killed himself by jumping off a bridge, leaving a suicide note which said, “I will not stand in your light any longer.” The following year, she moved to London, and remained for the rest of her life. She formed a jointly-managed company with Marion Lea and mounted Ibsen plays, including Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. When their partnership dissolved, she and William Archer created the New Century Theatre, where she appeared in so many productions of Ibsen plays she was called “Ibsen’s High Priestess.” In 1902, at age 40, she retired from acting, and focused on writing, having already published several novels and a collection of short stories, some under the pen name C.E. Raimond. She began attending open-air meetings of the suffrage movement, and in 1907 her novel The Convert was published. She also wrote her most successful play, Votes for Women, considered the first suffrage drama. She was a member of both the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and the Women’s Social and Political Union, although she broke with the WSPU when its protests became more violent. In 1909, she met Octavia Wilberforce, who, because she insisted on pursuing a career as a doctor, had been disinherited by her father, a man regarding careers as ‘unsexing’ for women. Robins and other friends provided financial and moral support until she succeeded in becoming a physician. Dr. Wilberforce was the great-granddaughter of William Wilberforce, noted British abolitionist, and became Robins’ doctor from then on. Robins contributed regularly to Time and Tide, a feminist magazine, and a public speaker for the cause, including the campaign to allow women to enter the House of Lords. Her friend Margaret Haig was the daughter of Viscount Rhondda, who designated his daughter in his will as the inheritor of his title. In 1918, when her father died, Haig became Viscountess Rhondda, but the House of Lords refused to allow her to take her seat. Women were not admitted to the House of Lords until 1958. In the 1920s, Robins wrote Ancilla’s Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism, and other books which explored sexual inequality. She stayed an independent single woman, but enjoyed long friendships with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and the poet James Masefield. Robins lived to the age of 89, dying in 1952, less than three months before her 90th birthday

1869 – Frank Cobb born, American newspaper editorial writer, and editor of the New York World (1904-1923)

1880 – Leo Carrillo born, American actor, political cartoonist and conservationist. Best known as an actor for playing Pancho in the television series The Cisco Kid (1950-1956).  He was born into a family with a long history in California, including a great-grandfather who was governor of Alta California (1837-1838), and a great-uncle who was alcalde (mayor) of Los Angeles (1826, 1828, and 1833). After graduating from college, Carrillo worked as a newspaper cartoonist for the San Francisco Examiner before he went to New York and worked on Broadway. Returning to Hollywood, he appeared in over 90 films. He was 70 years old when he began work on The Cisco Kid, which was the first TV series filmed in color. Carrillo served on the California Beach and Parks commission for 18 years, and played a key role in the state’s acquisition of Hearst Castle at San Simeon, and the Los Angeles Arboretum. A public beach near the Pacific Coast Highway was named Leo Carrillo State Park in his honor

1881 – Sir Alexander Fleming born, Scottish physician, bacteriologist and pharmacologist; discovered  the enzyme lysozyme (1923), but is mainly known for his discovery of penicillin (1928), for which he shared the 1945  Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain

1886 – Inez Milholland born, labor lawyer, suffragist, WWI correspondent and orator; led the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 on a white horse

1890 – Murderer William Kemmler is first person executed by electric chair, at Auburn Prison in New York state

1901 – Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation

1908 – Maria Ludwika Bernhard born, Polish classical archaeologist and specialist in Greek Art. During the WWII German occupation of Poland, she was active in the Polish Resistance as a liason officer of the Home Army and worked in communications. Bernhard also helped guard the art collections at the National Museum of Warsaw. She was arrested in 1940, and sent to Pawiak, a Gestapo prison. At the end of the war, she was released from prison, and became Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. She was also curator of the Ancient Art gallery at the National Museum (1945-1962). In 1957, she became the chair of the Department of Classical Archaeology at Jagiellonian University. She wrote the Polish-language four-volume History of Ancient Greek Art, and the seven-volume Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum

1908 – Helen Jacobs born, American tennis star who served as a commander in U.S. naval intelligence during WWII, one of only five women to achieve that rank in the U.S. Navy at the time

1911 – Lucille Ball born, producer and star of the television series I Love Lucy (1951-1957), and the first woman to head a major television studio, Desilu

1912 – The Progressive ‘Bull Moose’ Party holds their convention at the Chicago Coliseum; Jane Addams gives the seconding speech nominating Teddy Roosevelt as their presidential candidate, a first for a woman. Unlike Republicans and Democrats, the Progressive Party fully endorses women’s suffrage, in addition to advocating for child labor laws, and an 8-hour workday. Though they disagreed on how to end child labor, and gain suffrage for women – Addams favored federal laws, while Roosevelt wanted to stay with a state-by-state approach – they admired and respected each other. Roosevelt thanked Addams for her nominating speech in a telegram: “I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolizes for the new movement.”

1914 – Austria-Hungary declares war against Russia; Serbia declares war on Germany

1916 – Richard Hofstadter born, American “post-WWII liberal consensus” historian;  Social Darwinism in American Thought and Anti-intellectualism in American Life 

1920 – Selma Diamond born, Canadian-American writer for radio and television, and actress, whose family moved to New York when she was a child, giving her distinctive, raspy voice a Brooklyn accent. She wrote for a number of radio series in the 1940s, including Duffy’s Tavern, and was a staff writer for The Big Show (1950-1952). She moved to television, writing for Your Show of Shows (1952-1954), Caesar’s Hour (1954-1957), and Kraft Music Hall (1958-1963). In the 1960s and 1970s, she became a frequent guest on the Jack Paar Show, and the Tonight Show. Best remembered now for playing Bailiff Selma Hacker on the TV show Night Court, until her death from lung cancer in 1985

1928 – Jackie Presser born, American Teamsters Union leader, from 1983 until his death in 1988

1917 – Barbara Cooney born, American children’s author and illustrator, honored with two Caldecott Medals and a National Book Award

– from Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney

1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel

1926 – Elisabeth Beresford born in France, British author of children’s books, known for creating The Wombles of Wimbleton Common, who “make good use of bad rubbish”

1926 – Don Juan, starring John Barrymore opens, the first feature-length film using Vitaphone sound-on-disc system (synchronized musical score and sound effects)

1928 – Andy Warhol born, the first major American Pop Art artist

1930 – New York County Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi and disappears; a missing person case that has never been solved; he is declared legally dead in 1939

1930 – Abby Lincoln born as Anna Marie Woolridge, adopted the name Aminata Moseka after a 1970s tour of Africa, American singer-songwriter, actress and civil rights activist

1934 – Piers Anthony born, English-American science fiction and fantasy author; noted for his Xanth series

1940 – The Soviet Union illegally annexes Estonia

1942 – Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina is first reigning queen to address a U.S. Congressional joint session

1945 – The U.S. B-29 Enola Gay drops “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. 70,000 people are killed instantly, thousands die over years from burns and radiation –
Commemorated at Hiroshima Peace Ceremony & Peace Message Lantern Floating * in Japan and as Hiroshima Day * in the U.S. and UK

1947 – Radhia Cousot born in Tunisia, the only woman in her class at the Polytechnic School of Algiers – she was also ranked first in her class; French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation, a theory of sound approximation of the semantics of computer programs, a way of gaining information about control- and data- flow without performing all the usual calculations; after working as an associate research scientist at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble, she was appointed in 1980 to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where she rose through the research ranks to the senior level to head the research team “Semantics, Proof and Abstract Interpretation” in 1991, and then on to the École normale supérieur (2006-2014); honored with the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award in 2014

1956 – Final broadcast of the DuMont Television Network, a boxing match

1960 – Cuba nationalizes all foreign-owned property

1961 – Mary Ann Sieghart born, English journalist,  wrote a weekly political column for The Independent; BBC Radio 4 presenter of Start the Week; chair of the Social Market Foundation, an independent think tank

1962 – Jamaica becomes independent from Great Britain

1962 – Michelle Yeoh born, Malaysian actress, martial artist and film producer; best known as an actress for her performances in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for which she had to learn Mandarin phonetically, since she spoke Malay, English and Cantonese. In 2002, she co-produced the English-language film, The Touch, through her production company, Mythical Films.  In 2008, she filmed a documentary in Vietnam for the Asian Injury Prevention Foundation (AIPF). After portraying Aung San Suu Kyi in The Lady in 2011, she was blacklisted by the Myanmar government, and refused entry into the country. Yeoh is a patron of the Save China’s Tigers project, committed to protecting the endangered South China tiger

1965 – President Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law

1967 – Lorna Fitzsimons born, British Labour politician, member of Parliament for Rochdale (1997-2005); President of the National Union of Students (1992-1994)

1973 – Vera Farmiga, American actress, director and producer; she portrayed the Polish-American woman suffragist Ruza Wenclawska in the 2004 HBO film Iron Jawed Angels. She made her directorial debut with the 2011 film Higher Ground, in which she also starred. She was executive producer on the 2017 documentary film Unspoken, about Emma Zurcher-Long, who was diagnosed at age 2½ with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and taught herself to read and write. Farmiga was at the 2017 Women’s March in Vancouver with her daughter and husband, and was one of over 300 women in the entertainment industry to lend her name to the Time’s Up movement to end sexual harassment and inequality in the workplace

1979 – Marcus Hooper, aged 12, is the youngest person to swim the English Channel

1982 – American premiere of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in NYC

1988 – New York City Tompkins Square Park Riot – police charge at protesters of a new park curfew, causing a riot, and leading to over 100 complaints of police brutality

1990 – The UN Security Council votes 13-0, with Cuba and Yemen abstaining, for economic sanctions against Iraq

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases description of his idea for a World Wide Web

1991 – Takako Doi becomes first woman speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives

Takako Doi in 1986

1993 – Pope John Paul II issues his Veritatis splendor(‘splendor of truth’) encyclical, asserting that absolute truths and moral laws exist and are accessible to all persons; affirms the Catholic Church’s magisterium (moral authority); and self-determination is not an absolute, but must be bound by an understanding of Divine Law (as expressed by the Roman Catholic Church)

1996 – NASA says ALH 84001 meteorite contains evidence of primitive life-forms

2009 – U.S. senate confirms Sonia Sotomayor 68-31 as the first Hispanic, and third woman, on the U.S. Supreme Court

2012 – NASA’s Curiosity rover lands on surface of Mars

2015 – The expansion of the Suez Canal is inaugurated at a ceremony in Ismaïlia

2015 – Comedian Jon Stewart hosts The Daily Show for the last time

2017 – A deadly heat wave dubbed ‘Lucifer’ continues to hit many European countries, with record temperatures higher than 100 degrees, causing at least six deaths, and several wildfires, while torrential rains in a section of Italy caused flooding which killed one woman when her car was swept away. Farmers lost nearly a billion Euros worth of crops scorched in their fields

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