February 28th is
Chocolate Soufflé Day
Floral Design Day *
Digital Learning Day *
Tooth Fairy Day *
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MORE! Sylvia del Villard, Richard Spikes and Anne Brown, click
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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
Canada – Crowfoot:
Spring Madness Festival
Chile – Santa Cruz: Montes Music Fest
Egypt – Teachers Day
Finland – Kalevala (Finnish Culture Day)
Germany – Hamburg: Hamburg Coffee Festival
India – National Science Day
Italy – Milan: Bachata Day (dance)
Kenya – Nairobi: Cake City Donut Festival
Mexico – San Francisco:
San Pancho Music Festival
Mongolia – Hatgal:
Khövsgöl Ice Festival
New Zealand – Westport:
Buller Festival & Rafting Nationals
Nigeria – Abuja: Women’s Theatre Festival
Panama – Playa Chiquita:
Tribal Gathering (heritage festival)
Singapore: INKredible Festival
(Chinese ink painting)
South Africa – Cape Town:
Mojo’s African Music Festival
Spain – Andalusia: Día de Andalusía
Taiwan – Peace Memorial Day
Thailand – Thon Buri:
King’s Cup Elephant Boat Race
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On This Day in HISTORY
202 BC – The coronation ceremony as Liu Bang becomes Emperor Gaizu of Han ushers in four centuries of rule by the Han dynasty in China
1119 – Jin dynasty Emperor Xizong born, ruler of northern China (1135-1150); though a peace treaty was signed in 1139 between the Jin and the Southern Song dynasty, in 1140, Xizong ordered his general Wanyan Zongbi to take back the Henan and Shaanxi vassal states which he had ceded to the Southern Song in the treaty. By 1141, the Jin forces had been defeated by the Song, and he had to negotiate again for peace
1525 – The last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, has been overthrown by Spanish forces after smallpox devastated his city, but allowed to remain as a puppet ruler. Hernán Cortés on takes him along on his expedition to Honduras to prevent the deposed Aztec from mounting an insurrection during the expedition’s absence, but then hangs him and his few remaining retainers, supposedly for plotting to kill Cortés
1533 – Michel de Montaigne born, French philosopher and essayist, who popularized the essay form, influencing a wide range of major Western writers, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer, and Isaac Asimov
1638 – Scotland’s 1638 National Covenant is signed in Greyfriars kirkyard; subscribers, known as Covenanters, swear oaths to maintain the Scottish Presbyterian religion in the form it was in 1580, and to reject all innovations introduced since that time, while also professing loyalty to the King. Escalating clashes over the form of the state religion lead to the Covenanters raising an army to resist Charles I’s religious reforms, and the defeat of Charles in the Bishops’ Wars. This crisis in turn helped set off the Wars of the Three Kingdoms: the English Civil War, the Scottish Civil War and Irish Confederate Wars
1708 – During one of the earliest slave revolts in America, seven white people are killed in Newton, Long Island; two black male slaves and an Indian slave are hanged, and a black woman is burned alive
1783 – Gabriele Rossetti born, Italian poet, revolutionary, and scholar
1784 – John Wesley charters the Methodist Church
1797 – Mary Lyon born, American educator, founder of Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College)
1820 – John Tenniel born, British satirical cartoonist for Punch, and illustrator noted for his drawings in the first editions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
1827 – The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad becomes the first railroad incorporated for commercial transportation of people and freight
1849 – The first regular steamboat service to California via Cape Horn arrives in San Francisco; the SS California had left New York Harbor October 6, 1848
1854 – The Republican Party is organized in Ripon WI by about 50 slavery opponents
1859 – The Arkansas legislature requires free blacks to choose between exile and enslavement
1867 – Seventy years of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the U.S. are ended by a Congressional ban on federal funding of diplomatic envoys to the Vatican; they are not restored until January 10, 1984
1870 – The Bulgarian Exarchate (Orthodox church) is established by decree of Sultan Abdülaziz of the Ottoman Empire, consulting with the Ecumenical Patriarch
1876 – John Alden Carpenter born, American composer; pioneer in using Jazz rhythms in orchestral music
1877 – Sergei Bortkevych born, Ukrainian Romantic composer and pianist
1882 – Geraldine Farrar born, American soprano and actress; she made a sensational debut at the Berlin Hofoper as Marguerite in Charles Gounod’s Faust in 1901, and appeared in different European venues until her debut at the NY Metropolitan Opera in Romeo et Juliette in 1906; sang the title role in the first Met production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and remained at the Met until her retirement in 1922; her young women admirers were nicknamed “Gerry flappers”
1883 – Benjamin Franklin Keith opens the first vaudeville theatre in Boston Massachusetts
1885 – AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) is incorporated; capitalized on only $100,000, it provides long distance service for American Bell
1893 – Edward G. Acheson shows his patent for Carborundum
1894 – Ben Hecht born, American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, war correspondent, and newspaper crime reporter. His script for the 1927 film Underworld was awarded the very first Oscar for Best Screenplay at the inaugural Academy Awards
1898 – Molly Picon born, Yiddish performer, entertained troops in Korea and Japan during World War II, renowned for somersaults and flips well into her seventies, wrote one-woman show, “Hello, Molly” (1979), and an autobiography, Molly (1980)
1900 – Second Anglo-Boer War: British reinforcements under General Sir Redvers Buller finally break through the Boers besieging Ladysmith, a South African town northwest of Durban and south of Johannesburg, which had been under siege for four months, after three previous attempts by the British to break the siege had failed. Winston Churchill was traveling with the relieving force as a 25-year-old war correspondent for The Morning Post
1901 – Linus Pauling born, American Nobel Prize-winning chemist and political activist
1909 – Stephen Spender born, English poet and critic
1909 – Ketti Frings born as Katherine Hartley; American author, playwright and screenwriter; won a 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel as a play which opened on Broadway in 1957; also noted for her 1940 novel, Hold Back the Dawn
1911 – Thomas A. Edison, Inc. is organized
1920 – Jadwiga Piłsudska born, Polish pilot; just started studies in aircraft engineering at Warsaw Polytechnic when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, so with her mother and elder sister, she fled to Lithuania and from there to the United Kingdom; after earning her pilot’s license, she served in the WWII British women’s Air Transport Auxiliary
1922 – The armed revolt of white South African mineworkers at the East Rand gold mine, begun in December, 1921, intensifies when three miners are shot and killed outside the prison in Boksburg. Following a decline of over 25% in the world price of gold, Rand had tried to cut their operating costs by decreasing wages, and weakening the colour bar to promote lower-paid black miners to skilled and supervisory positions. The initial rebellion had spread throughout the Witwatersrand region of the country, and 20,000 troops were sent in by Prime Minister Jan Smuts to crush it
1927 – Tooth Fairy Day * is started when Esther Watkins Arnold prints an 8-page playlet for children called The Tooth Fairy, which is first performed by schoolchildren the following year
1928 – Sylvia del Villard born, actress, dancer, choreographer and Afro-Puerto Rican activist; director of Afro-Puerto Rican Affairs at the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture (1981-1988)
1932 – Richard Spikes patents the automatic gear shift for automobiles
1943 – Porgy and Bess opens on Broadway, starring Todd Duncan and Anne Brown
1945 – Linda Preiss Rothschild born, American mathematician and academic; worked on polynominal factorization, partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and the theory of several complex variables; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2005
1948 – Bernadette Peters born as Bernadette Lazzara, American Broadway actress and singer, a two-time Tony Award winner, who has also appeared on film and television. She is also a children’s book author. In 1999, she and Mary Tyler Moore co-founded Broadway Barks, a pet adoption charity which has an annual adopt-a-thon that has made over 2,000 adoptions possible. She also held a combined benefit concert for both Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Broadway Barks in 2009 that raised $615,000 for the two charities
Bernadette Peters “singing a duet” at the 2015 Broadway Barks adopt-a-thon
1951 – A Senate committee issues a report that there are at least two major crime syndicates in the U.S.
1953 – At Cambridge University, scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick discover the double-helix structure of DNA
1956 – A patent is issued to Forrester Research for a computer memory core
1958 – Natalya Estemirova born, Russian newspaper correspondent, documentary filmmaker and human rights activist who was a board member of the Russian human rights organization Memorial. She was abducted from her home in 2009, and found shot to death in a wooded area. The Sweden-based human rights organization Civil Rights Defenders named the Natalia Project after Estemirova. The Natalia Project is an alarm and positioning system for human rights defenders at risk. Estemirova’s murder remains officially unsolved
Protesters holding up photos of Natalya Estemirova after her murder
1959 – Megan McDonald born, American children’s author; noted for her series Judy Moody and The Sisters Club
1962 – The John Glenn for President Club is formed by some Las Vegas Republicans
1974 – The U.S. and Egypt re-establish diplomatic relations after a 7-year break
1983 – The final episode of “M*A*S*H” airs, the most watched TV program in history
1983 – U2 releases their album War
1984 – Michael Jackson wins seven Grammy awards for his album Thriller
1986 – Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme is assassinated in Stockholm
1990 – Philip Emeagwali, a Nigerian computer scientist, receives the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, for an oil reservoir modeling calculation using a novel mathematical formulation and implementation
1991 – Allied forces suspend their attacks as Iraq pledges to accept all UN resolutions concerning Kuwait
1993 – U.S. ATF agents raid the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco to arrest leader David Koresh on firearms charges; 4 agents and 4 Davidians are killed; followed by a 51-day standoff
1994 – NATO makes its first military strike when U.S. F-16 fighters shoot down four Bosnian Serb warplanes in violation of a no-fly zone over central Bosnia
1995 – Denver International Airport opens after a 16-month construction delay
1995 – Floral Design Day * is declared in Massachusetts, to honor Carl Rittner, of the Rittners School of Floral Design, a pioneer for over 60 years in floral art education, and to celebrate the art of floral design
1998 – Serbian police begin a campaign to wipe out “terrorist gangs” in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo
2002 – Sotheby’s auction house announces Peter Paul Rubens is now considered the artist who painted The Massacre of the Innocents, previously thought to be by Jan van den Hoecke
2007 – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft makes a gravitational slingshot against Jupiter to change a planned trajectory towards Pluto
New Horizons photograph of Pluto
2012 – Digital Learning Day * is launched, an annual day to highlight the best in innovative new ways for teachers to use technology in the classroom
2013 – Benedict XVI becomes the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415 and the first to resign voluntarily since Celestine V in 1294
2016 – In the first election after Iran signed a nuclear deal brokered by the U.S. and other permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5+1), Iranian reformists allied with President Hassan Rouhani, sweep Iran’s parliamentary elections, winning all 30 seats in Tehran
2017 – Donald Trump told the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to review a sweeping clean water rule ordered by the Obama administration, saying he hoped he was “paving the way for the elimination of this very destructive and horrible rule.” Trump said the regulation, which he called “a massive power grab,” unnecessarily burdened farmers and businesses. Scrapping it could make it easier for farmers and developers to drain wetlands and small streams. But Outdoor recreation and environmental groups said the rule, which affects 60 percent of the nation’s water bodies, was critical in the protection of drinking water, the landscape, and wildlife
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