October 29^th is

International Internet Day *

National Cat Day *

National Hermit Day *

National Oatmeal Day

World Psoriasis Day

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MORE! Shin Saimdang, Thambi Naidoo and Marcia Fudge, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia – Sydney: Grafton Jacaranda Festival

Cambodia – King Norodom Sihamony
Coronation Day

Canada – Montreal:
Chamber Festival in Old Montreal (music)

Chile – Providencia: Vocal Jazz Festival

India – Jaipur: Evening Navarati Celebration
(Hindu ritual, folk dance and food festival)

Italy –Trieste: Science+Fiction Festival

Japan – Yokohama:
Sankeien Chrysanthemum Exhibition

Mexico – Monterrey: Festival Santa Lucía

Morocco – Casablanca: Futur.e.s. in Africa
(Landfill alternatives symposium)

Netherlands – The Hague: Crossing Border
International Music and Literature Festival

Norway – Oslo: Oslo World Music Festival

South Africa – Cape Town:
ImproGuise Horror Fest

Turkey – Cumhuriyet Bayramı
(Republic Day)

United Arab Emirates – Dubai:
The Specialty Food Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

539 BC – Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, enters the capital of Babylon and allows the Jews to return to their land

632 AD – Saint Colman dies in Ireland, after seven years as a hermit in the Burren Forest – remembered by Irish-Catholic Americans on National Hermit Day, *  it’s also a good day for spending some quiet ‘alone time’ in the midst of a busy life

1390 –Witch trials in a secular court in Paris – three people are killed – two of them women, burned for ‘afliction [sic] of illness, manipulation of affections’ and diabolism

1504 – Shin Saimdang born, Korean artist, writer, poet and calligrapher; called Eojin Eomeoni (어진 어머니; “Wise Mother”), and honored as a model of Confucian ideals; pennames: Saim, Saimdang, Inimang and Imsajae; she was the oldest of five sisters in a family with no sons, so her maternal grandfather taught her as if she were his grandson, an education very rare for women in that time and place; her husband, Commander Yi Wonsu, appreciated her intelligence and education, which she passed on to their son, the Confucian scholar Yi L, who was also a revered politician and reformer, passing the Civil Service exam at the age of 13; Saimdang died suddenly of unknown cause at the age of 48. In 2009, she became the first woman to appear on a South Korean banknote, the 50,000 won

1618 – English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England

1675 – Gottfried Leibniz makes the first use of the long s (∫) as a symbol of the integral in calculus

1711 – Laura Bassi born, Italian philosopher, physicist and academic; received the second recorded doctoral degree awarded to a woman by a university, the University of Bologna in 1732, (Elena Cornaro Pisopia was the first, in 1678); first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe;also recognized as first woman university chair in a scientific field of studies. Initially, the university restricted her to one lecture per year, so she conducted private lessons, and performed experiments at home; called upon to attend most of the events the University opened to the public, so petitioned for pay increases, which she used to buy her advanced equipment. When the experimental physics department chair died suddenly, she’s appointed to replace him, serving for the two years until her death. Bassi made invaluable contributions to the field of science while also helping to spread  Newtonianism in Italy

1775 – William Hayley born, English poet, biographer, patron of the arts

1787 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is first performed, in Prague

1792 – Mount Hood in Oregon is named after Samuel Hood, 1st Viscount Hood by Lt. William E. Broughton who sighted the mountain near the mouth of the Willamette River

1808 – Caterina Scarpellini born, Italian astronomer and meteorologist. She discovered a comet on April 1, 1854; in 1856, Scarpellini established a meteorological station in Rome; corresponding member of the Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence, and honored by the Italian government for her work in 1872

1837 – Harriet Powers born, African-American quilter and folk artist; her quilts are on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA

1863 – Eighteen countries meet in Geneva, agreeing to form the International Red Cross

1880 – Anzia Yezierska born in Poland (then part of the Russian Empire), Jewish-American author and short story writer; her family emigrated to the U.S. when she was a child. After marrying in 1910, she had a daughter, but left with her child in 1914, moving to San Francisco. She was quickly overwhelmed trying to work and raise a child on her own, and gave her daughter up to her estranged husband. They were divorced in 1916, and she moved back to New York. She wrote about the struggles of Jewish and Puerto Rican immigrants living on New York’s Lower East Side, especially the problems of wives. At first, she was only able to get  her short stories published in magazines, but her novel, Salome of the Tenements, published in 1923, led to her best-known book, Bread Givers, followed by Arrogant Beggar, and All I Could Never Be. During the Depression, she worked for the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, but then fell into obscurity until 1950, when her fictionalized biography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, revived interest in her work. She was nearly 70 years old by then, and was losing her eyesight, but continued to write short stories and book reviews until her death in 1970 at the age of 90 

1888 – The Convention of Constantinople is signed, guaranteeing free maritime passage through the Suez Canal during war and peace

1891 – Fanny Brice born, American comedian and comic singer

1899 –Kate Seredy born in Hungary, American children’s book author-illustrator and bookstore owner; winner of a 1938 Newbery Medal and 1971 Caldecott Honor; most of her books are written in English, her second language

1901 – Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, which had been serialized in the U.S. in McClure’s Magazine, and in the U.K. in Cassell’s Magazine, is published for the first time in book form, quickly becoming a bestseller

1913 – Mahatma Gandhi leads hundreds of men, women and children on a march from Newcastle, Natal Colony (now KwaZulu Natal) into the Transvaal in defiance of the Immigrants Regulation Act of 1913. Two additional parties are led by Thambi Naidoo of the Transvaal British Indian Association’s Executive Committee, and Indian rights activist Albert Christopher. Gandhi is arrested on October 30^th. Thambi Naidoo had mobilized the Indian community for the march, which was the start of the Satyagraha (Passive Resistance) Campaign

Thambi Naidoo and Gandhi

1921 – Bill Mauldin born, American editorial cartoonist noted for his WWII cartoons of Willie and Joe, two weary infantry troopers enduring hardship and danger in the field. He was awarded two Pultizer Prizes, one in 1945 for his wartime body of work, and another in 1959, while working for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for an editorial cartoon depicting Russian author Boris Pasternak in a Soviet Gulag, asking another prisoner, “I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?”

1921 – The second trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in the U.S. In spite of confused and conflicting testimony, they will be found guilty, setting off an international outcry

1922 – King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy appoints Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister

1923 – Turkey becomes a republic following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

1929 – The New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called Crash of ’29 or “Black Tuesday” ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s, and starts the Great Depression

1929 – The U.S. Stock Market crash causes Brazilian coffee quotations to fall to 60%

1930 –Natalie Sleeth born, American religious music composer and organist; noted for choral anthem, “Joy in the Morning”

1932 – Joyce Gould born, Baroness Gould of Potternewton, British Labour Party politician and pharmacist; member of Campaign Against Racial Discriminations (1965-1975), Secretary of the National Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organizations (1975-1985), and served in various capacities with a number of other commissions and organizations; in 1993, made a Life Peer,  serving on House of Lords committees, involved with anti-racism, gender equity and civil liberty issues in particular

1934 – First day of the International Conference of Musicology in Madrid, sponsored by the League of Nations to encourage the musical arts

1938 – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf born, Liberian politician, President of Liberia (2006-2018),  first elected female head of state in Africa, awarded 2011 Nobel Peace Prize

1940 – The U.S. begins a peacetime military draft, requiring all male citizens between age 26 and 35 to register

1947 – First successful cloud seeding, using dry ice, took place at Concord NH

1947 – Helen Lloyd Coonan born, Australian Liberal Party politician; Senator for New South Wales (1996-2011); the first woman in the Coalition Leadership Team as Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate (2006-2007); served as Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer (2001-2004) and Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (2004-2007)

1948 – Safsaf massacre: Israeli soldiers capture Palestinian Arab village of Safsaf in the Galilee and massacre villagers

1952 – Marcia Fudge born, American Democratic politician; Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio’s 11^th District since 2008; Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (2013-2015); Mayor of Warrensville Heights (2000-2008)

1956 – Maria Callas makes her debut at the NY Metropolitan Opera in Norma

1956 – Israel invades Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula during the Suez Canal crisis

1956 – “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” premieres as NBC’s nightly TV newscast.

1966 – Mary Bucholtz born, American professor of linguistics at University of California, Santa Barbara, noted for work on sociocultural linguistics and for developing the tactics of intersubjectivity framework with Kira Hall; co-author of Gender articulated: language and the socially constructed self

1967 – The musical Hair opens off-Broadway

1969 – ‘L’ ‘O’ – first letters transmitted on the Internet, which crashed before the rest of the message was sent – honored on International Internet Day *

1970 – Neil Diamond receives a gold record for “Cracklin’ Rosie”

1986 – The M25, or London Orbital Motorway, is officially opened – almost immediately, traffic levels are double the maximum design capacity

1991 – NASA’s Galileo spacecraft makes its closest approach to 951 Gaspra, becoming the first probe to visit an asteroid

Model of NASA’s Galileo spacecraft

1998 – In South Africa, after four years of hearings, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission presents its report, which condemns both sides for committing atrocities

2004 – European Union leaders sign the EU’s first constitution

2005 – First National Cat Day,* started by animal welfare advocate Colleen Paige

2015 – China announces the end of the One-Child Policy after 35 years, and a new Two-Child Policy is instituted

2017 – The World Meteorological Society announced that Carbon dioxide levels surged in 2016 to the highest level in 800,000 years due to human-caused pollution and a strong El Niño. The key greenhouse gas concentrations reached an average of 403.3 parts per million in 2016, up from 400 parts per million the year before, and the increase was 50 percent greater than the average over the last 10 years. The organization said the change could mean worsening “severe ecological and economic disruptions,” because the last time CO2 levels were this high the planet was 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warmer, and sea levels were as much as 20 meters higher than they are now

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