November 14th is

World Diabetes Day *

Loosen Up, Lighten Up Day

Pickle Appreciation Day

Operating Room Nurse Day

Spicy Guacamole Day

National Speakers Association Spirit Day *

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MORE! Nellie Bly, Steve Biko and Ruby Bridges, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia – Mullumbimby:
Mullum Music Festival

Belgium – Brussels: BAFF Art Film Festival

Brazil – São Paulo: Anymotion Festival

Canada – Fredericton:
Contemporary Music Festival

Columbia – Day of the Columbian Woman *

France – Caen: Festival Les Boreales
(Nordic art & literature festival)

Georgia – Tbilisi: DataFest Tbilisi

Ghana – Kumasi:
National Festival of Art and Culture

Guinea Bissau –
Readjustment Movement Day

India – Children’s Day

Indonesia – Mobile Brigade Day *

Ireland – Dublin: St. Laurence O’Toole
(patron saint feast day)

Lebanon – Beirut: Beirut Cooking Festival

Malaysia – Kota Kinabalu: Asian Youth Theatre Festival

Mexico – León:
León International Balloon Festival

Romania – Dobruja Day
(1878 incorporation of Northern Dobruja)

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On This Day in HISTORY

1449 – Sidonie of Poděbrady born, she and her twin sister Catherine were Bohemian princesses. In 1464, Sidonie was married at age 14 to Albert, the son of Frederick II, Elector of Saxony. Four months later, he became Albert III, Duke of Saxony, when his father died, and Sidonie became Duchess consort of Saxony, and later Margravine consort of Meissen. She was against warfare and violence, refusing to accompany Albert when he started wars against Groningen and Friesland, and protested by removing their children from the court to Albrechtsburg Castle. Many of her letters of correspondence have been preserved, in which she pleads for the release of prisoners. In September 1500, Albert died, leaving Sidonie a widow. She withdrew from the Saxon court and spent the rest of her years in Tharandt, near Dresden, where she died in February 1510 at the age of 60.

1501 – Anna of Oldenburg born, Countess consort of East Frisia who became Regent of East Fresia (1540-1561) as the guardian of her sons during their minority. She tried to maintain religious tolerance, allowing Catholics and Spiritualists to practice their faith. Only under pressure from Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, did Baptism become forbidden in East Frisia in 1549. Anna also founded the police force (1545)  and reformed the legal system in East Frisia. Next to its administrative tasks, the Chancellery was given judiciary tasks. Councillors and legal scholars were added to the Chancellery to carry out these tasks. The Chancellery was mostly a court of appeals, but would also act a court of first instance in cases involving the nobility. In 1558, Anna abolished the law of primogeniture (the firstborn son’s right of succession), and  established that each of her three sons would share power. This was an attempt to maintain religious balance, and to limit the growing influence of Sweden during protracted negotiations for the marriage of her eldest son Edzard and princess Katharina Vasa of Sweden, which finally took place in 1559. When Count John II “the Mad” of Harlingerland seized a strip of East Frisian land at the Accumer Deep, she took her case to the Reichskammergericht and to the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle. The Circle arrested John, who had made many enemies, and he died in captivity in 1562.  Anna’s division of power was not a success. Her middle son died in 1566, and the remaining brothers were locked in a power struggle, which weakened their rule, but strengthened the nobility, and the citizens of Emden, center of the Protestant Reformation in East Frisia. Anna died in September 1575 at the age of 73.

1666 – First experimental blood transfusion takes place in Britain, between two dogs

1668 – Johann von Hildebrandt born, Austrian Baroque architect and military engineer; designed/built the Belvedere palaces for Prince Eugene of Savoy

South front of upper Belvedere Palace

1719 – Leopold Mozart born, Austrian violinist, composer, and conductor

1765 – Robert Fulton born, American engineer and inventor

1770 – Scottish explorer James Bruce arrives at the source of the Blue Nile at Lake Tana in northwest Ethiopia – but which European got there first is disputed

1805 – Fanny Mendelssohn born, German pianist and composer

1832 – New York City’s first streetcar goes into operation – it is horse-drawn and can carry 30 people

1840 – Claude Monet born, French Impressionist painter

Haystack: End of Summer by Claude Monet

1851 – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is published in the U.S.

Opening lines of Moby Dick – illustration by Rockwell Kent

1856 – Madeleine Lemoyne Ellicott born, American woman suffragist; one of the organizers of the Pan-American Conference of Women in 1922; founding member of the League of Women Voters, and founder of the Maryland chapter of the League of Women Voters, serving as its president for 20 years

1878 – Julie Manet born, French painter, artist’s model, art collector and diarist, Growing Up with the Impressionists

Julie Manet with cat, by August Renoir

1881 – Charles J. Guiteau’s trial for assassinating U.S. President Garfield opens

1889 – Jawaharlal Nehru born, Indian independence leader; India’s first Prime Minister (1947-1964)

1889 – Queen Victoria approved a Royal Charter creating the British South Africa Company (BSAC), the final step in the formation of Zambesia, giving almost sovereign powers to the BSAC, headed by Cecil Rhodes. In October 1888, King Lobengula of the Matabele (Ndebele) had signed the Rudd concession with C.D. Rudd, a partner of Rhodes, by which, in return for a thousand Martini-Henry rifles, 100 000 rounds of ammunition, £1200 annually and a steamboat with guns, Lobengula had given Rhodes and his partners a monopoly of all the metals and minerals in his kingdom and the right to mining companies to do anything necessary to further their operations. When Lobengula later discovered what the concession really meant, he tried to renounce it, but the British Government paid no heed to him. After 1894 the country was renamed Rhodesia in honour of Rhodes. Known as Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980

1889 – Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochrane) begins her challenge: to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg’s record, going around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes

1900 – Aaron Copeland born, American composer; Copeland has had a major impact on the “American Sound” in orchestral music

1903 – The U.S. Women’s Trade Union League is established

 1906 – Louise Brooks born, actress, dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and silent film star in American and German films (Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both for G.W. Pabst in 1929); Her iconic bobbed hairstyle was much copied by her fans in the 1920s. Her career began a downslide in the 1930s, and she went through a period of obscurity, alcoholism and suicidal depression in New York before being “rediscovered” in 1953 by French film historian Henri Langlois. Brooks began a new career as a film critic, and her book Lulu in Hollywood was published in 1982. She died of a heart attack in 1985, at age 78

1907 – Astrid Lindgren born, Swedish author, best known for the Pippi Longstocking series

1910 – Aviator Eugene Burton Ely makes the first takeoff from a ship in a Curtiss pusher, from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia

1918 – Czechoslovakia becomes a republic

1920 – Mary Greyeyes born, a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the first First Nations woman to join the Canadian Armed Forces, serving in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (1942-1946); a publicity picture of her in uniform brought her much attention; at the end WWII, Indigenous people who served in the Canadian military were offered the choice to give up their treaty rights and Indian status in return for the right to vote, and she was urged to visit a polling station and have her picture taken voting, but she pointed out the unfairness of the voting laws and refused. First Nations people didn’t get the right to vote in Canada until 1960

1921 – Ea Jansen born in Estonia, Finno-Ugric historian; most of her research focused on the national awakening of Estonia, and she made substantial contributions to the knowledge of this period; taught at the Tallinn Pedagogical University

1922 – Veronica Lake born, American actress whose long ‘peek-a-boo’ hair was so copied that she changed her hairstyle during WWII to help prevent women working in wartime factories from catching their hair in the machinery. Her struggles with alcohol hurt her later career

1922 – The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) begins domestic radio service

1934 – Catherine McGuinness born, Irish jurist and politician; represented the University of Dublin in the Seanad Éireann (Ireland’s Senate – 1979-1981 and 1983-1987); first woman Judge of the Circuit Court (1994-1996); Judge of the High Court (1996-2000); Judge of the Supreme Court (2000-2006); President of the Law Reform Commission (2005-2011); Member of the Council of State since 2012

1935 – Franklin Roosevelt announces that the Philippines have become a free commonwealth after approval of their new constitution. The Tydings-McDuffie Act plans for the Philippines to be completely independent by July 4, 1946

1935 – King Hussein of Jordan born, reigned from 1953 to 1999

1939 – Wendy Carlos, born Walter Carlos, American musician and composer noted for electronic music and film scores, particularly featuring the Moog synthesizer

1940 – WWII: German planes bomb Coventry, England, destroying most of the town

1943 – Assistant Conductor Leonard Bernstein, age 25, debuts with the New York Philharmonic, fills in for ailing Bruno Walter prior to a national broadcast concert

1944 – Karen Armstrong born, British author, former nun and commentator; a former Roman Catholic religious sister; noted for her books on comparative religion and as a writer and presenter for BBC Channel Four; A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam 

1944 – Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra record “Opus No. 1” for RCA Records

1945 – Louise Ellman born, British Labour Co-operative Member of Parliament for Liverpool Riverside since 1997

1946 – Emily Greene Balch, co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1946 – The Mobile Brigade * (now Korps Brigade Mobil/Brimob) of Indonesia is reorganized from the Pasukan Polisi Istimewa (special police troops) to suppress military conflicts and attempted coups d’etat. The Pasukan Polisi Istimewa was a militarized police force organized in 1945 to disarm remnants of the Japanese Army, and protect Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, which was called Batavia before the country became independent

1950 – Sarah Radclyffe born, British film producer; co-founder of Working Title Films; noted as executive producer on Caravaggio, Wish You Were Here, A World Apart, Les Misérables (1998 version), and The War Zone

1954 – Condoleezza Rice born, American Republican politician; second woman to be U.S. Secretary of State (2005-2009)

1956 – The USSR crushes the Hungarian uprising

1956 – Babette Babich born, American philosopher; known for studies of Nietzsche,  Heidegger, Anders, Adorno, and Hölderlin, and work in aesthetics, including philosophy of music, life-size bronzes in antiquity (Greek sculpture), and continental philosophy, especially the philosophy of science and technology. Babich has also made substantive contributions to scholarly discussion of the role of politics in institutional philosophy (the analytic-continental divide) as well as gender in the academy

1956 – Valerie Jarrett born, American public servant in the Obama Administration; Director of the U.S. Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs (2009-2017), and Senior Advisor to the President (2009-2017); previously served in various positions in the mayor’s office in Chicago (1987-2005) and was a member of the Chicago Stock Exchange (2000-2007) and as its chair (2004-2007)

1960 – Ruby Bridges becomes the first black child to attend a segregated white elementary school in Louisiana

Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges
being escorted to school by U.S. Marshalls

1961 – The Elvis Presley film Blue Hawaii premieres

1962 – Laura San Giacomo born, American actress, noted for her portrayal of Maya Gallo in the TV series Just Shoot Me! (1997-2003), and for the films Sex, Lies and Videotapes; Pretty Woman; and Quigley Down Under. San Giacomo is an active supporter of several charities for people with disabilities (her son Mason has cerebral palsy). She is a founder of the CHIME Charter Elementary School, an inclusion school for all children of all abilities, which provides free public education to 600-700 students, Kindergarten through 8^th grade, who are admitted through a lottery system

1967 – The Columbian Congress declares the “Day of the Columbia Woman” in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the death of ‘La Pola’, Policarpa Salavarrieta, a Neogranadine seamstress-turned-spy for the revolutionary forces fighting against the Spanish who was caught and executed

Policarpa Salavarrieta, watercolor by José María Espinosa

1968 – Yale University announces it is going co-educational

1969 – Apollo 12 blasts off from Cape Kennedy FL on the second manned moon mission

1970 – Santana releases Black Magic Woman

1972 – Blue Ribbon Sports becomes Nike

1972 – Lara Giddings born, Australian Labor politician; Premier of Tasmania (2011-2014); Deputy Premier of Tasmania (2008-2011); Treasurer of Tasmania (2010-2014); Member of the Tasmanian Parliament (1996-1998 and 2002-2018)

1973 – National Speakers Association Spirit Day * – the National Speakers Association was founded in this year by Cavett Robert, who was born on November 14, 1907, so he is honored by the association on Spirit Day

1977 – The inquest into the death while in police custody of Black Consciousness leader Steven Biko opens in Pretoria, South Africa

1983 – The British government announces that 96 Tomahawk cruise missiles, part of a planned NATO deployment, have arrived at Greenham Common air base; thousands of protesting women who have camped outside the gate stage a lie-in

1986 – The SEC fines Ivan Boesky $100 million for insider stock trading

1991 – World Diabetes Day * is launched by the International Diabetes Federation

1994 – U.S. experts visit North Korea’s main nuclear complex for the first time under an accord that opened such sites to outside inspections

1995 – The U.S. government institutes a partial shutdown, closing national parks and museums while most government offices operate with skeleton crews, due to lack of funds because President Clinton vetoed the spending bill sent to him by the Republican-controlled Congress which brutally slashed funding for Medicare, education, the environment, and public health

1999 – The United Nations imposes sanctions on Afghanistan for refusing to hand over terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden

2007 – Buildings in Kaixian, China are demolished to make way for the Three Gorges project – the urban area, dating back 1,800 years, is submerged under the Three Gorges reservoir by October 2008

2017 – Australians overwhelming supported gay marriage in a historic non-binding vote, clearing the way for Parliament to make same-sex marriage legal in the country. In the survey, 61.6 percent voted yes and 38.4 percent voted no, officials announced. Turnout was 79.5 percent. “The Australian people have spoken, and they have voted overwhelmingly ‘yes’ for marriage equality,” said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Supporters burst into cheers in public squares as the result was announced. “Finally I can be proud of my country,” said Chris Lewis, 60, an artist from Sydney. “No” advocate Lyle Shelton, a Christian lobbyist, said he would “accept the democratic decision.” 

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