January 22nd is

Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day

Blonde Brownie Day

National Hot Sauce Day *

Southern Food Day

Roe v Wade Day *

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MORE! Beatrice Webb, Kenneth Kaunda and Madeleine Albright, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia – Perth:
Fringe World Festival

Bolivia – Día de la Fundación del
Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia

Brazil – Palmeiras: Ressonar Festival

Canada – Saskatoon: Winterruption 

Costa Rica – Tamarindo:
Ocaso Music & Art Festival

Egypt – Cairo: International Book Fair

Ethiopia – Addis Ababa: Short Film Screening

France – Val d’Isère:
Clasicaval Festival Musical

India – Kila Raipur: Kila Raopur Sports Festival

Peru – Cusco:
Festival de Postres Ilimitados

Philippines – Iloilo City: Dinayang Festival

Poland – Grandfather’s Day

Spain – Benalmádena: Andalusia Football Fest

Tanzania – Arusha:
KAN Festival (Arts networking)

Thailand – Chiang Mai:
Woke Folks Festival

Ukraine – Day of Unity

United Kingdom – Manchester:
Manchester Beer and Cider Festival

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On This Day in HISTORY

871 –The West Saxons, led by King Æthelred I, are defeated by Danelaw Vikings at the Battle of Basing in what is now the English county of Hampshire

1506 – The first contingent of 150 Swiss Guards arrives at the Vatican

1517 – The Ottoman Empire under Selim I defeats the Mamluk Sultanate and captures present-day Egypt at the Battle of Ridaniya

1552 – Walter Raleigh born, English poet, soldier, courtier, and explorer

1561 – Francis Bacon born, English philosopher and politician, Attorney General for England and Wales

1573 – John Donne, English poet and Church of England cleric, wrote the Holy Sonnets

1666 – Shah Jahan, descendant of Genghis Khan, dies at age 74. He was the Mongul emperor of India who built the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz-i-Mahal

1689 – The Convention Parliament convenes to determine whether James II and VII, the last Roman Catholic monarch of England, Ireland and Scotland, had vacated the thrones of England and Ireland when he fled to France in 1688

1737 – John Hancock born, American revolutionary and statesman

1771 – The Falkland Islands are ceded to Britain by Spain

1788 – Lord Byron born, leading English Romantic poet and member of the House of Lords – quote below from his speech about the Luddites

1789 – Georgetown University is established in what is now Washington DC

1792 – Lady Lucy Whitmore born, English hymn writer, noted for “Father, again in Jesus’ name we meet” published in 1824 in Family prayers for every day in the week 

1808 – The Portuguese royal family, Sereníssima Casa de Bragança, arrives in Brazil after fleeing the French army’s invasion of Portugal two months earlier

1824 – The Ashantis defeat British forces in the Gold Coast

1840 – The first settlers’ ship arrives at Auckland Island, New Zealand

1849 – Elizabeth Blackwell becomes the first woman in America to receive a medical degree, from the Medical Institution of Geneva, New York

1849 –August Strindberg born, Swedish playwright, novelist and poet; best known for Fröken Julie (Miss Julie)

1858 – Beatrice Webb, English economist-sociologist- social reformer, co-founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science, coined term “collective bargaining”

1863 – The January Uprising in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus – a national movement to regain Polish–Lithuanian–Ruthenian Commonwealth from Russian occupation

1867 – Gisela Januszewska born, Austrian Jewish physician; first woman doctor to practice in Banja Luka, Bosnia, and one of the few physicians who treated Bosnian Muslim women, heading an outpatient clinic for them; received highest decorations for her WWI medical corps service; after the war, moved to Graz, where she treated the poor for free, and was the second Austrian physician awarded the title Medizinalrat, for outstanding contributions to medicine; given the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit, Austria’s highest honor, in 1937; but when the Nazis invaded Austria, her Graz apartment was confiscated in 1940, forcing her to move to Vienna, where she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and died there in 1943

1879 – James Shields begins a term as U.S. Senator from Missouri, having previously served Illinois and Minnesota. He is the first Senator to serve three different states

1879 – Anglo-Zulu War: In the first major encounter between British troops and Zulu warriors, the British seriously underestimate their foes, and are massacred by the Zulus at Isandhlwana, but the Zulus also suffer great losses. Two eyewitness accounts of the solar eclipse that occurred during the afternoon of the battle: A British officer sent out in advance of the British column which arrived too late said, “In a few seconds we distinctly saw the guns fired again, one after the other, sharp. This was done several times – a pause, and then a flash – flash! The sun was shining on the camp at the time, and then the camp looked dark, just as if a shadow was passing over it. The guns did not fire after that, and in a few minutes all the tents had disappeared.” A Zulu warrior recalled, “The sun turned black in the middle of the battle; we could still see it over us, or should have thought we had been fighting till evening. Then we got into the camp, and there was a great deal of smoke and firing. Afterwards the sun came out bright again.”

The Battle Of Isandlwana – The Last Stand
by Charles Edwin Fipp, 1885

1887 – Columbia Phonograph Company is founded, getting its name from being headquartered in the District of Columbia

1887 –Helen Hoyt born, American poet and associate editor of Poetry magazine (1913-1936); edited several poetry anthologies, including The Second Book of Modern Verse

1890 – The United Mine Workers of America is founded in Columbus OH

1892 – Coca-Cola was incorporated

1897 – Rosa Ponselle born, American operatic soprano; she made her debut in 1918 just days after the end of WWI, at the New York Metropolitan Opera in Verdi’s  La forza del destino opposite Enrico Caruso

1897 – Dilipkumar Roy born, Bengali Indian musician, musicologist, civil servant, novelist, poet, playwright and essayist

1898 – Sergei Eisenstein born, influential Russian filmmaker; his “Odessa steps” scene is one of the most studied and imitated in film history

1901 – Queen Victoria dies at the age of 81, having served as Britain’s Monarch for almost 64 years; her son Albert Edward, is proclaimed King, as Edward VII

1903 – Hay-Herrán Treaty is signed by U.S. Secretary of State John M. Hay and Colombian Chargé Dr. Tomás Herrán, granting the U. S. rights to land proposed for the Panama Canal

1904 – George Balanchine born in Russia, Russian-American dancer, choreographer, co-founder/director of the New York City Ballet, and a leading cause of anorexia and bulimia among ballerinas

1905 – Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg, beginning of the 1905 revolution, 500 people, most of them workers, are killed

1916 – Henri Dutilleux born, French composer

1917 – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson makes a speech calling for ending the war in Europe with a “peace without victory” – the U.S. will enter WWI the following April

1924 – Ramsay MacDonald becomes the United Kingdom’s first Labour Prime Minister

1930 – Excavation begins in New York City for the Empire State Building

1932 – New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination

1938 – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town has its first public performance in Princeton NJ

1946 – President Truman establishes the National Intelligence Authority, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency

1947 – KTLA, first commercial television station west of the Mississippi River, begins operation in Hollywood

1953 – Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible debuts on Broadway

Still photo of the 1953 production of The Crucible

1961 – Wilma Rudolph, sets a new world indoor record in the women’s 60-yard dash, running it in 6.9 seconds

1962 – Tony Bennett records “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”

1962 – Cuba’s membership in the Organization of American States (OAS) is suspended

1963 – The Drifters record “On Broadway”

1964 – The 24^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, eliminating the poll tax in federal elections

1964 – Kenneth Kaunda is sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Northern Rhodesia

1965 – Diane Lane born, American Actress, Academy Award nominee; noted for her active involvement with Heifer International and Actors for Peace and Justice, and her participation in the documentary  Half the Sky, based on the book  Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

Diane Land and Edna Edan

1968 – “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” first airs on NBC- TV

1972 – The United Kingdom, the Irish Republic, and Denmark join the EEC

1973 – President Nixon announces an accord has been reached to end the Vietnam War

1973 – The U.S. Supreme Court delivers its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, voting 7-2 to legalize elective abortion in all 50 states

1977 – The TV mini-series Roots begins airing on ABC

1997 – The U.S. Senate confirms Madeleine Albright as first woman secretary of state

2002 – Lawyers suing Enron Corp. ask a court to prevent further shredding of documents due to the pending federal investigation.

2003 – Scientists in China report finding fossilized remains of a dinosaur with four feathered wings

2006 – Evo Morales is inaugurated as Bolivia’s first indigenous president

2013 – Hot Sauce Day * goes national

2014 – Water vapor is detected on the dwarf planet Ceres by scientists using the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory

2016 – In response to the outcry over the lack of minorities represented in the Oscar nominations, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it will be doubling the number of women and minority members by 2020. “The Academy is going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up,” Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs said in a statement. 2016 was the second year in a row that only white actors were nominated for the highest cinematic honor

AMPAS President Cheryl Boone Isaacs

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