March 6th is

European Day of the Righteous

Oreo Cookie Day *

Frozen Food Day *

Day of the Dude

Dentist’s Day

White Chocolate Cheesecake Day

Sonya Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day *
_____________________________________

MORE! Ella P. Stewart, Mary Wilson and Berta Cáceres, click

_____________________________________

WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia – Moyston:
Pitch Festival (electronic music)

Canada – Vancouver:
International Dance Festival

Chile – Valdivia de Paine:
Montemapu Festival (ecology & culture)

Czechia – Prague: Burlesque Festival

Egypt – Luxor: African Film Festival

France – Tarbes: Garosnow Festival

Ghana – Independence Day

Honduras – Santa Cruz de Yojoa:
Kairos Music Festival

Japan – Kyoto: Hanatōuro
(Lanterns & Flower Illuminations)

Kenya – Nairobi: Africa Law Tech Festival

Norfolk Island – Foundation Day

Peru – Lima: Alianza por las Mujeres
(International Women’s Day celebration)

Philippines – Makati: Hot Air Balloon Festival

South Africa – Knysna:
Knysna Literary Festival

United Kingdom – London:
Women of the World Festival

_____________________________________

On This Day in HISTORY

12 BC – Roman Emperor Augustus is named Pontifex Maximus (high priest of the College of Pontiffs, head of the state religion), adding it to the Emperor’s titles

Augustus as Pontifex Maximus

632 – Farewell Sermon (Khutbah/Khutbatul Wada) of Islamic Prophet Muhammad, in the Uranah valley of Mount Arafat, during the Islamic pilgrimage of Hajj

1475 – Michelangelo born, Italian sculptor, painter and architect

Michelangelo’s Pietà,St Peter’s Basilica (1498–99)

1521 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Guam

1619 – Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac born, French dramatist and satirist, noted for A Voyage to the Moon; the inspiration for Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac

1665 – The first joint Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, publishes the first issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

1745 – Casimir Pulaski born, Polish nobleman, revolutionary and military commander; organizer of the Pulaski Cavalry Legion for the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and reformer of the entire American cavalry; one of only eight people awarded honorary U.S. citizenship

1780 – Lucy Barnes born, American author; her letters, poems and dissertations were collected and printed in a large pamphlet after her death, The Female Christian, believed to be the first defense written by a woman of Universalism (no eternal damnation, all souls will ultimately be reconciled to God)

1791 – Anna Claypoole Peale born, American painter, known for portrait miniatures and still life paintings

Self-Portrait, by Anna Claypoole Peale (1815)

1806 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning born, English poet and writer; in frail health, she used her pen to campaign for the abolition of slavery and influence reform of child labour laws. After the publication of her Poems in 1844 was much acclaimed, Robert Browning began a correspondence with her, which turned into a secret courtship and marriage. Her father disinherited her when he learned of their wedding.  She and her husband moved to Italy in 1846, where she gave birth to their son in 1849. Her health continued to decline, and she died in Florence in 1861. Robert Browning published her last poems posthumously

1808 – At Harvard University, the first college orchestra is founded

1820 – The ‘Missouri Compromise’ was enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed by U.S. President James Monroe. The act admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state, but prohibited slavery in the rest of the northern Louisiana Purchase territory

1825 – Beethoven’s Opus 127: String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major premieres

Ludvig van Beethoven – 1820, by Joseph Karl Stieler

1834 – The city of York in Upper Canada is incorporated as Toronto

1836 – The thirteen-day siege of the Alamo by Santa Anna and his Mexican army of 3000 ends, when the small group of Texas volunteers are overrun by a massed Mexican attack

1853 – Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata opera debuts in Venice

1854 – The Pope’s Stone is stolen from the lapidarium of the Washington Monument

1857 – The U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous ruling, the Dred Scott decision that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported and sold as slaves” whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. The Court went further to declare that Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights when dealing with slaves in the territories, effectively rendering the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and making all territories open to slavery until they become states, and could, if they choose, enact state laws against it. Southerners celebrated this as a major victory, but Frederick Douglass predicted, “This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the whole slave system.” In August, 2017, in the dark and early hours of the morning, Maryland officials removed the statue of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney (1836-1864), who wrote the majority opinion in the case, from the grounds of the state capitol in Annapolis.

Dred Scott, portrait by Louis Schultze

1863 – Carrie Belle Kearney born, American teacher, author, suffragist, temperance reformer, and white racist; first woman elected to the Mississippi State Senate

1882 – Sarah Wambaugh born, American political scientist, one of the world’s leading authorities on plebiscites, adviser to various commissions including the U.N. Plebiscite Commission to Jammu and Kashmir

1885 – Ring Lardner born, American writer and satirist

1886 – The Nightingale is launched, the first nursing magazine, edited by Sarah Post

1893 – Ella Phillips Stewart born, one of the first African-American women pharmacists.  She was the oldest child of sharecroppers in Virginia, who was sent at age six to live with her grandmother so she could go to school. She was top of her class, and won major scholarships to Storer Normal School for her secondary education, but left school to get married, and moved with her husband to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When their only child died at age three of whooping cough, they divorced. Stewart began working in a pharmacy as a bookkeeper, and became interested in becoming a pharmacist. In spite of the prejudice against African Americans and women, she was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy in 1914. In 1916, she became the first black woman to graduate from Pitt’s pharmacy program, and to pass the state examination. After working briefly as an assistant pharmacist, she opened her own drugstore at the General Hospital in Braddock, Pennsylvania. In 1918, she moved back to Pittsburgh and opened her pharmacy there. When she married William Stewart, another pharmacist, they worked in several cities before settling in Toledo, Ohio, and opening Stewarts’ Pharmacy in 1922. She became involved in African-American civic and service organizations, including the YWCA, the Enterprise Charity Club, the Ohio Association of Colored Women, and she was president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (1948-1952). In 1952, she was a delegate to the International Conference of Women of the World in Athens, Greece, and then became a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. government. In 1963, she was appointed to the U.S. commission of UNESCO. She died in Toledo at the age of 94 in 1987

1899 – Aspirin is patented by German researchers Felix Hoffman and Hermann Dreser

1912 – Oreo * sandwich cookies are first introduced by the National Biscuit Co., which later became Nabisco

1924 – Sarah Caldwell born, American impresario, opera conductor and stage director

1927 – Gabriel García Márquez born, Colombian novelist, journalist and screenwriter; 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature; best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera

1928 – Chinese Civil War: a Communist attack on Peking (Beijing) results in 3,000 dead and 50,000 fled to Swatow (now spelled Shantou), which is on the coast, over 830 miles (1338 km) from Beijing

1937 – Valentina Tereshkova born, Russian cosmonaut, engineer, and General-major in the Soviet Air Force, and selected as a cosmonaut because of her expert skill in parachuting. She was the first woman to fly in space. piloting Vostok 6. Tereshkova was politically active after the collapse of the USSR, and is seen as a heroine in post-Soviet Russia

1939 – In Spain, Jose Miaja takes over the Madrid government after a military coup and vows to seek “peace with honor”

1939 – Charles Fuller born, African American playwright, co-founder of Philadelphia’s Afro-American Theatre; A Soldier’s Play won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

1941 – Dame Marilyn Strathern born, Welsh anthropologist, noted for work with natives of Papua New Guinea and in the UK on reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization,  co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception; Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (1993-2008) and Mistress of Girton College (1998-2009)

1943 – Norman Rockwell publishes ‘Freedom from Want’ in The Saturday Evening Post with a matching essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the “Four Freedoms” series

1944 – Mary Wilson born, American singer, one of the founding members of The Supremes; author of Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme and Supreme Faith: Someday We’ll Be Together

1944 – Kiri Te Kanawa born, New Zealand lyric soprano, appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1982, and appointed to the Order of New Zealand in 1995

1946 – Ho Chi Minh, President of Vietnam, strikes an agreement with France that recognizes his country as an autonomous state within the Indochinese Federation and the French Union

1947 – The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the contempt conviction of John L. Lewis, United Mine Workers of America president

1947 – Winston Churchill announces he opposes British troop withdrawals from India

1947 – Jean Seaton born, English historian and academic; Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster; Official Historian of the BBC; noted for her volume of the official history of the BBC, Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation 1970-1987. Director of the Orwell Prize (for political writing, three prizes awarded annually: one each for outstanding Book, Journalism, and Exposing Britain’s social evils) – her commentary on Orwell for BBC radio:

1947 – Rayda Jacobs born, South African author and documentary filmmaker; noted for her novels, Eyes of the Sky, which won the 1996 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction, The Slave Book and Sachs Street. She also wrote the screenplay and co-directed Confessions of a Gambler, based on her novel of the same name

1947 – The first air-conditioned naval ship, The Newport News, is launched from Newport News VA

1953 – Carolyn Porco born, American astronomer; planetary scientist known for work on the outer solar system, leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission to Saturn; expert on planetary rings and Saturn’s moon Enceladus; she was awarded the 2008 Isaac Asimov Science Award, the 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award for photographic work, and the 2010 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Communication of Science to the Public

1957 – The British African colonies of the Gold Coast and Togoland become the independent state of Ghana

1960 – In Switzerland, women gained the right to vote in municipal elections, but they could not vote in federal elections until 1971. Beginning in the late 1950s, Swiss women in some French-speaking cantons were able vote in local referendums. The first petition by Swiss women for political rights had been presented to the Federal Assembly in 1886

1960 – The U.S. says it is sending 3,500 troops to Vietnam

1961 – Ruth Golembo born, South African financial journalist and managing director of Lange Public Relations (1995-2016); worked as investment columnist for the Business Times, the Financial Mail and the Sunday Times

1967 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announces his plan to establish a draft lottery

1973 – U.S. President Richard Nixon imposes price controls on oil and gas

1973 – John Lennon’s visa extension is canceled by the New York Office of the Immigration Department only 5 days after it was granted: the “official” reason was his marijuana conviction in 1968, but is really because of his involvement in left-wing politics while in America

1975 – Iran and Iraq announce that they have settled their border dispute

1980 –Islamic militants in Tehran say that they will turn over American hostages to the Revolutionary Council

1981 – Walter Cronkite appears on his last episode of “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” the end of 19 years on the job

1981 – Ronald Reagan announces a plan to cut 37,000 federal jobs

1993 – Unita rebels capture Huambo, Angola’s 2nd-largest city, after a 2-month battle with Angolan government troops

1984 – The original Frozen Food Day * is proclaimed by President Reagan

1985 – Yul Brynner’s 4,500th performance in The King and I

1990 – In Afghanistan, an attempted coup against President Najibullah fails

1990 – Russian Parliament passes a law sanctioning ownership of private property

1991 – In Paris, five men are jailed for plotting to smuggle Libyan arms to the Irish Republican Army

1992 – The computer virus “Michelangelo” goes into effect

1997 – A gunman steals Tete de Femme, a million-dollar Picasso portrait, from a London gallery; the painting is recovered a week later

1997 – Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II launches the first official royal Web site

2005 – Tsotsi becomes the first South African film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film; also the first African film not made in French to win

2012 – 9,000 residents are evacuated from Wagga Wagga, Australia, as the Murrimbidgee River threatens to overflow

2015 – NASA spacecraft Dawn enters orbit around dwarf planet Ceres after a 7 ½ year journey of 3,100 million miles (4,900 million km)

2016 – Honduran President Juan Hernández asks UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad Al-Hussein to assist in the investigation of the murder of Berta Cáceres, an environmental activist and indigenous leader, coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, for spearheading  “a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam” at the Río Gualcarque” in Western Honduras. The river is sacred to the Lenca people, the largest indigenous group in Honduras, who depend on it for their subsistence

2019 – U.S. Senator Martha McSally (Republican – Arizona) said a superior officer raped her during the time she served in the Air Force. She made the revelation during a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on sexual assault in the military. McSally, the first woman fighter pilot to fly a combat mission, called for reforms in the ways the Pentagon handles such cases. “Like you, I am also a military sexual assault survivor,” McSally said, addressing people who had been assaulted. “But unlike so many brave survivors, I didn’t report being sexually assaulted. Like so many women and men, I didn’t trust the system at the time. I blamed myself. I was ashamed and confused, and I thought I was strong but felt powerless.”

_____________________________________