November 9th is

Chaos Never Dies Day

Microtia Awareness Day *

Greek Yogurt Day

National Scrapple Day

World Freedom Day *

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MORE! Dorothy Dandridge, Carl Sagan and Jill Dando, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Islam – Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (begins at sundown) 

Austria & Switzerland – Inventor’s Day
(Hedy Lamarr’s birthday)

Azerbaijan – Flag Day

Bolivia – Dia de los ñatitas (Day of the skulls)

Brazil – São Paulo: Festival Nova Brasil

Cambodia – Independence Day

Germany – Berlin Wall Opening Day *

India – Bengaluru: Bangalore Literature Festival

Kenya – Lamu: Maulid Religious Festival

Nigeria – Abuja:
Chef Fatima Global Food Fest

Pakistan – Allama Muhammad Iqbal Day
(Independence activist, major Urdu poet)

Peru – Día de Camaná
(Camaná province anniversary)

Singapore – Singapore Motor Festival

South Africa – Pretoria:
Power in Women Summer Festival

Spain – Madrid: Virgen de la Almudena
(Virgin Mary celebration, Madrid’s patron)

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On This Day in HISTORY

694 – Egica, Visigoth King of Hispania, accuses Jews of aiding Muslims, and sentences all Jews to slavery

955 – Gyeongjong of Goryeo born, fifth ruler of the Goryeo dynasty of Korea (975-981)

1470 map of Korea – one of the oldest known maps of the country

1277 – Treaty of Aberconwy is signed by King Edward I of England and Llewelyn ap Gruffydd of Wales, also called ‘Llywelyn  the Last’ because he was the last sovereign prince of Wales. The peace treaty ended the first of the Welsh wars, but also led to the end of Welsh self-rule when Llewelyn dies in 1282

Llewelyn ap Gruffydd of Wales

1535 – Nanda Bayin born, King of the Toungoo Dynasty of Burma (1581-1599)

1620 – Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sight land at Cape Cod MA

Mayflower in riptide off Monomoy point, painted by Mike Haywood

1697 – Claudio Casciolini born, Italian singer and composer

1720 – The synagogue of Judah HeHasid, leader of the largest group of Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel in the 17th and 18th centuries, is burned down by Arab creditors who had loaned the group money to build the synagogue, leading to the expulsion of the Ashkenazim from Jerusalem

1723 – Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia born, became Princess Abbess of Quedlinburg (1756-1787); noted as a musical patron, and a collector of music whose library included over 600 volumes of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, among many others; she was herself a composer of chamber works, but many of them have been lost

1731 – Benjamin Banneker born, a free black American farmer, surveyor, and self-taught astronomer, who built a clock entirely out of wood, the first clock built in the American colonies, which kept perfect time for 40 years

1732 – Julie de Lespinasse born, Frenchwoman who hosted an influential Salon during the Enlightenment; also noted for her love letters, published over 30 years after her death, first to the Marquis de Mora, son of the Spanish Ambassador to France, who died from tuberculosis in 1774, and then to the Comte de Guibert, whose marriage to another woman led to her downward spiral into depression, opium addiction, and death at age 43

1801 – Gail Borden Jr. born, American inventor of condensed milk

1802 – Elijah Parish Lovejoy born, American Presbyterian minister, newspaper editor and abolitionist, is murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton Illinois during an attack on his printing press, to destroy it and his abolitionist newspaper

1818 – Ivan Turgenev born, Russian author and playwright; Fathers and Sons

1851 – Kentucky marshals abduct abolitionist and Methodist minister Calvin Fairbank from Jeffersonville, Indiana, and take him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave escape, where he is convicted, and serves 15 years in prison. Fairbank is believed to have helped 47 escaped slaves.

1853 – Stanford White born, American architect, co-founder McKim, Mead & White; he was murdered in 1906 by Harry Thaw, enraged and obsessed with White’s abuse of Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, one of several teenage girls he seduced and raped; Nesbit had been a 16-year-old chorus girl (probably even younger, as she likely lied about her age to get work) prior to her marriage to Thaw

1854 – Maud Howe Elliott born, American writer, co-author with her sister of a biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1917, the first year the prize for biography was given. She was a founding member of the Progressive Party and a participant in the woman suffrage movement. Howe was also a founder of the Newport Art Association in Rhode Island, and its secretary (1912-1942)

1857 – The Atlantic Monthly is founded in Boston Massachusetts

1867 – Shrimad Rajchandra born, an Indian Jain philosopher and poet, spiritual mentor of Mahatma Gandhi. After they met in Mumbai in 1891, they exchanged letters while Gandhi was in South Africa, and his teachings directly influenced Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. Rajchandra was an advocate for women’s education; his best-known poem, Atma Siddhi, is a Gujarati short verse poem about the six fundamental truths, or steps, to self-realisation in Jainism

1871 – Florence R. Sabin born, American anatomist and a pioneering woman in medical science; first woamn full professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine; first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences; first woman department head at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; Chaired the Colorado Governors’ Committee on Health, spear-heading campaign to pass health reform laws, named the ‘Sabin Health Laws’ in her honor, which drastically reduced tuberculosis cases in the state, expanded and improved hospital care, and became a blueprint for health reform in other states

1872 – The Great Fire of Boston begins, which would burn 65 acres of the city

1877 – Allama Muhammad Iqbal * born, Pakistani poet, philosopher and politician

1880 – Giles Gilbert Scott born, English architect, designed the red telephone box

1887 – The U.S. gets rights to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

1891 – Louisa E. Rhine born, American doctor of botany, who was initially a research fellow in plant physiology, but became the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences. After she and her husband, J.B. Rhine, trained with Dr. Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society (1926-1927), then moved to Durham, North Carolina, where her husband helped launch Duke University’s parapsychology department. She stopped working in 1928 to raise their adopted son, and was co-founder of the Durham Nursery School, the first nursery school in South Carolina for children of working women, and also helped form the Durham Chapter of the League of Women Voters. In 1948, she returned to academic research, where she took over reading and answering letters from the public about the Duke parapsychology lab, at first part-time, but later she began full-time work researching and analyzing thousands of experiences from letters sent to her, and laying the groundwork for their classification

1902 – Anthony Asquith born, English film director and screenwriter; The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, Pygmalion and The Importance of Being Earnest

1905 – Erika Mann born, daughter of Thomas Mann, German anti-Nazi writer who moved to Switzerland in 1933, then in 1935 entered a marriage of convenience with W.H. Auden to obtain a British passport after her German citizenship was rescinded by the Nazis; her 1938 book, School for Barbarians, criticized the Nazi education system; she worked for the BBC during WWII, broadcasting in German, and after D-Day was a war correspondent traveling with the Allied forces, also covered the Nuremberg trials; after the war, she moved to the U.S., but was branded a Communist during the McCarthy witchhunt, and moved back to Switzerland

1906 – Theodore Roosevelt is the first sitting U.S. President to make an official trip outside the country, going to Panama to inspect progress on the Panama Canal

1907 – The Cullinan Diamond is presented to King Edward VII on his 66th birthday

1911 – George Claude of Paris, France, applies for a patent on neon signs

1913 – The Great Lakes Storm of 1913 destroys 19 ships and kills over 250 people

1914 – Hedy Lamarr born in Austria, American film star, and inventor who developed a radio guidance system with composer George Antheil, which used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology that was twenty years ahead of the time, and became the basis for modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology

1916 – Martha Settle Putney born, American lieutenant and historian who was one of the first black members of the WWII Women’s Army Corps, and chronicled the history of African Americans in the U.S. armed forces

1918 – Florence Chadwick, American swimmer; first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions (1950), setting a women’s time record in both directions. She was also the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel (1952), and the Straits of Gibraltar (1953), where she set an all-time record, and the Bosporus (one way), as well as the Dardanelles (round trip)

1921 – The Italian National Fascist Party is founded

1922 – Dorothy Dandridge born, first black American to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress, for her role in the 1954 film Carmen Jones

1923 – James Schuyler born, American poet, playwright and novelist; Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection Morning of the Poem

1923 – Elizabeth Hawley born, American journalist, and chronicler of Himalayan expeditions from the early 1960s until her death in 2018. Even though she never climbed a mountain, she was respected by the international mountaineering community for her accurate and detailed records; Peak Hawley in Nepal is named for her

1928 – Anne Sexton born, American poet; 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Live or Die; co-authored four children’s books with poet Maxine Kumin; she battled severe  bipolar disorder. Her last poetry collection, The Awful Rowing Toward God, was published after her 1974 suicide

1934 – Carl Sagan born, American astrophysicist, cosmologist and popular author of Cosmos, and presenter on the TV series

1935 – The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) is founded in Atlantic City NJ, by eight trade unions belonging to the American Federation of Labor (AFL)

1936 – Mary Travers born, singer-songwriter with Peter, Paul and Mary

1937 – Roger McGough born, English poet, author and playwright; one of the leading Liverpool poets of the 1960s; The Mersey Sound

1938 – Nazis loot and burn synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria on Kristallnacht, “night of broken glass”

1938 – Ti-Grace Atkinson born, American extreme radical feminist and author; early member of the National Organization for Women, but left NOW because of disputes over abortion, marriage inequalities and heterosexual sex; founder of  The Feminists (1968-1973), advocate of political lesbianism; author of Amazon Odyssey

1940 – The city of Warsaw is awarded Poland’s highest military honor, Order Wojenny Virtuti Militari, for heroism and courage in the face of the enemy

1941 – Tom Fogarty born, American guitarist with Creedence Clearwater Revival

1945 – Moeletsi Mbeki born, South African political economist and deputy chair of the South African Institute of International Affairs, an independent think tank. Also a member of the executive council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies

1946 – Dame Marina Warner born, British novelist and historian whose non-fiction works frequently relate to feminism and myth; first woman elected president of the Royal Society of Literature since its founding in 1820

1948 – Jane Humphries born, American-British Professor of Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford; her field is economic growth and development and the industrial revolution; Gender and Economics, Childhood and child labour in the British Industrial Revolution

1950 – Parekura Horomia born, New Zealand Labour Party politician of Māori descent; Minister of Māori Affairs (2000-2008), where he played a significant role in setting up  Maori Television and expanding iwi radio, and frequently advised Prime Minister Helen Clark on Māoridom and Māoritanga; Member of Parliament for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti  (1999-2013)

1953 – Cambodia gains independence from France

1960 – Robert McNamara becomes the first non-Ford family member to be named president of Ford Motor Company, but he resigns to join the Kennedy administration

1960 – Sara Franklin born, American anthropologist, who combines ethnographic methods and kinship theory with fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology and stem cell research, as well as leading major research studies addressing the cultural and social dimensions of new reproductive and genetic technologies; among the first researchers to analyse the forms of social change associated with the introduction of new reproductive technologies in the 1980s

1961 – Jill Dando born, English journalist, newsreader, and presenter of the BBC programme Crimewatch; after working as a print journalist (1980-1985), she worked in regional BBC television (1985-1988), then moved to national television news on BBC1 and BBC2 (1986-1995) before moving to presenting Crimewatch in 1995, and also did episodes of other programmes. She was shot to death on April 26, 1999, outside her home. A local man was convicted and imprisoned for the murder, but was later acquitted after an appeal and retrial. The case remains open

1962 – The Miracles release “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”

1965 – A series of blackouts leave the U.S. Northeast and parts of Canada in the dark

1967 – The first issue of Rolling Stone magazine is published

1970 – The U.S. Supreme Courts votes 6–3 against hearing a case to allow enforcement of a Massachusetts law granting residents the right to refuse military service in an undeclared war

1973 – Billy Joel’s song “Piano Man” is released

1976 – U.N. General Assembly approves 10 resolutions against South African apartheid

1979 – NORAD computers detect a purported massive Soviet nuclear strike. After raw date is reviewed from satellites and early-warning radar is checked, alert is cancelled

1985 – Garry Kasparov, 22, of the Soviet Union becomes the youngest World Chess Champion by beating fellow Soviet Anatoly Karpov

1989 – Berlin Wall Opening Day * – East Germany opens checkpoints  in the Berlin Wall, allowing its citizens to travel to West Berlin

1994 – The chemical element Darmstadtium is discovered

1998 – Capital punishment in the United Kingdom, already abolished for murder, is completely abolished for all remaining capital offences

2001 – The first World Freedom Day * commemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall

2005 – The Venus Express mission of the European Space Agency is launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan

2011 – Penn State fires university president Graham Spanier and football coach Joe Paterno for their mishandling of child sexual abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky

2015 – Egyptian military intelligence detains Hossam Bahgat, noted investigative journalist for Mada Masr and founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, questioning him for over 9 hours on Sunday, November 8, and keeping him in custody. Bahgat is later charged with “publishing false news that harms national interests and disseminating information that disturbs public peace.” He has been an outspoken critic of the military regime, now headed by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which overthrew Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and dissolved the Egyptian Constitution of 2012. He was released in November, 2015, with charge against him neither dismissed or pursued. In 2016, the government froze his assets, charging that he illegally accepted foreign funding, then placed him under a travel ban 

2016 – The Ear Community Organization starts Microtia Awareness Day, * to bring attention to this birth defect that effects about 1 in every 9,000 children born, which causes deafness and ear deformity. The cause has not been discovered, and research is underfunded, but advancements in bio-ear technology can improve ear appearance

2018 – Donald Trump signed a proclamation to restrict asylum claims, saying any migrant who crosses the border illegally will be blocked from seeking asylum. The Immigration and Nationality Act says anyone who arrives in the U.S. “whether or not at a designated port of arrival” may apply for asylum, but Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen claimed it is in the “national interest” to suspend or restrict migrant entry. “Our asylum system is overwhelmed with too many meritless asylum claims from aliens,” they said in a statement

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