June 25th is

Global Beatles Day

National Catfish Day

Color TV Day *

World Vitiligo Day *

Strawberry Parfait Day

International Day of the Seafarer

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MORE! Rose O’Neill, Ho Chi Minh and Nisha Ganatra, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Canada – Discovery Day

Croatia –Statehood Day

Guatemala – Teacher’s Day

Mozambique – Independence Day

Philippines – Arbor Day

Slovenia – National Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1526 – Elisabeth Brooke Parr, Marchioness of Northampton, influential courtier during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, who managed to survive the scandal of living openly with William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton, after his first wife Anne left him and had an illegitimate child by her lover in 1541. Parr was able to divorce Anne on grounds of adultery by 1543, but was not allowed under the law to remarry. He and Elisabeth married anyway, but it was considered bigamy. Finally, in 1551, a private bill was passed in Parliament annulling his first marriage, and accepting Elisabeth as his legal wife. But upon the accession of the very Catholic Queen Mary I, he was ordered to return to his first wife, and stripped of his titles. After Mary died in 1558, his titles were restored, and his marriage to Elisabeth was once again accepted. The restored Marchioness became very close to Queen Elizabeth I, and as a consequence, she was much courted, even by foreign ambassadors, who hoped she would use her influence in their favor. Elisabeth died in 1565, at age 39, after suffering for a year from breast cancer, and trying every false cure offered. Both Elizabeth I and William Parr were devastated

1530 – At the Diet of Augsburg the Augsburg Confession is presented to the Holy Roman Emperor by the Lutheran princes and Electors of Germany; the Augsburg Confession, written in both German and Latin, is the primary confession of faith of the Lutheran Church and one of the most important documents of the Lutheran Reformation

1667 – French Doctor Jean-Baptiste Denys performs the first fully documented human blood transfusion; he transfused about twelve ounces of sheep blood into a 15-year-old boy, who survived the transfusion

1678 – Venetian Elena Cornaro Piscopia becomes the first woman awarded a doctorate of philosophy when she graduates from the University of Padua

1689 – Edward Holyoke born, American, Harvard University president (1737-1769)

1741 – Maria Theresa is crowned Queen of Hungary, the only woman ruler of the Habsburg dominions, and the last of the House of Habsburg. She was the sovereign (1740-1780) of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands, and Parma. By marriage, she was Duchess of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress (1745-1765).  She was the oldest of three daughters of Emperor Charles VI.  Facing his lack of male heirs four years before Maria Theresa’s birth, her father provided for a male-line succession failure with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, overturning the Salic law of male-only succession, then spent the rest of his reign making costly deals with the other European powers to insure its recognition at his death. But when he died in 1740, France, Spain, Saxony-Poland, Bavaria and Prussia reneged, setting off the War of the Austrian Succession, which plagued the new queen for the first eight years of her reign. She had married Francis I, the Holy Roman Emperor in 1736, and they had 11 daughters and 5 sons. Ten of their children survived to adulthood. Though she was expected to cede power to Francis and their eldest son Joseph, both of whom were officially her co-rulers in Austria and Bohemia, Maria Theresa was the absolute sovereign who ruled with the counsel of her advisers. She made institutional, financial and educational reforms, and promoted commerce and agricultural development, and reorganized the army. On the down side, she was a bigoted Roman Catholic, who regarded Jews and Protestants as dangerous to the state, advocating for Catholicism to be the state religion, and trying to put an end to religious pluralism. In the last years of her reign, she did allow some limited state protections of Jews, prohibiting forced conversion, surplice fees (a surcharge to Catholic priests for weddings, baby-namings and funerals, even though the services were performed by Jewish officiates), and blood libel (the false accusation of Jews murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals)

1788 – Virginia becomes the tenth U.S. state to ratify the Constitution

1852 – Antonio Gaudi born, innovative Spanish (Catalan) architect

1860 – Gustave Charpentier born, French composer; opera Louise

1867 – Lucien B. Smith patents the first barbed wire

1868 – Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina  readmitted to the Union

1874 – Rose O’Neill born, American cartoonist, illustrator, writer and feminist; the first published American woman cartoonist (True  magazine, 1896); creator of the  popular comic strip Kewpies (debut 1909); she was the highest-paid woman illustrator of her day.  Kewpies also became dolls, in several versions, first manufactured in 1912

1876 – George Armstrong Custer’s men are defeated at Little Big Horn by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors; over 50% of the troops are killed, including Custer

1881 – Crystal Eastman born, American lawyer, suffragist and writer. American lawyer, suffragist and writer. She was a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage, as a co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max Eastman of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and a co-founder in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2000 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York

1885 – Benito Lynch born, Argentine novelist and short story writer

1887 – George Abbott born, American producer, director, playwright and actor; his career spanned over 80 years; among many awards are a Tony for a career distinguished achievement in the theatre, and a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award

1898 – Kay Sage born, American Surrealist artist and poet

I Saw Three Cities – by Kay Sage (1944)

1990 – Lord Louis Mountbatten born, English statesman, naval leader; last viceroy of British India

1900 – Zinaïda Aksentieva born, Ukrainian-Soviet astronomer and geophysicist; she worked on mapping gravity and tidal deformation of the earth; Director of the Poltava Observatory (1951-1969); a crater on Venus is named in her honor

1900 – Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovers the Dunhuang manuscripts, a cache of ancient texts that are of great historical and religious significance, in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China

1903 – Madame Marie Curie announces her discovery of radium

1903 – Eric Blair born, known by his pen name George Orwell, English author, essayist and journalist: his strong support of democratic socialism and opposition to totalitarianism, especially in 1984  and Animal Farm, continues to influence popular and political culture

1906 – Mentally unstable Pittsburgh PA millionaire Harry Thaw shoots and kills renowned architect Stanford White, who had sexually assaulted Thaw’s wife, former chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, when she was 16

1910 – The U.S. Congress passes the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes.” The ambiguous language of “immorality” allowed it to be used to criminalize consensual sexual behavior (amended since to apply to transport for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts)

1910 – Diaghilev’s premiers Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird

Poster art for Ballets Russes 1910 Firebird

1911 – William H. Stein born, American biochemist, 1972 Nobel Prize

1912 – Virginia Lacy Jones born, pioneering African American librarian, and activist in the integration of public and academic libraries. She was the second  black American to earn a PhD in Library Science (1945), and was the dean of the Atlanta University School of Library Science (1945-1981)

1913 – American Civil War veterans begin arriving at the Great Reunion of 1913.

1921 – Celia Franca born in England, daughter of Polish immigrants; English Canada dancer-choreographer; founder and first artistic director (1951-1975) of the National Ballet of Canada

1923 – Dorothy Gilman born, American author, Mrs. Pollifax spy thriller series

1926 – Dame Margaret Anstee born, British diplomat, served at the UN from 1952 to 1993; in 1987 became the first woman Under-Secretary-General, and became the first woman to head a peacekeeping mission, in Angola (1992-1993). She worked on operational programmes of economic and social development with the UN Development Programme, and also served as Coordinator for all UN narcotic drug control programmes in the late 1980s. After leaving the UN in 1993, she became a Special Adviser to the government of Bolivia on matters relating to development and international finance

1926 – Ingeborg Bachmann born, Austrian poet, radio scriptwriter, prose author and short story writer. She was awarded the 1971 Anton Wildgrans Prize, a juried prize given to writers of Austrian citizenship who are considered to embody the best of Austrian values

1928 – Rita Rapp born, American physiologist who led NASA’s Apollo Food System team (1966-1973), and the team responsible for the food the Skylab space station (1973-1974)

1934 – Beatriz Sheridan born, Mexican director and actress, pioneer of Mexican telenovelas, and prominent figure in Mexican theatre

1938 – The U.S. federal minimum wage is 25 cents an hour

1946 – Ho Chi Minh goes to France for talks on Vietnamese independence

1947 – The Diary of Anne Frank is published in the Netherlands

1950 – War begins on the Korean peninsula as North Korea invades South Korea

1951 – Eva Bayer-Fluckiger born, Swiss mathematician and professor, worked on topology, algebra number theory, lattices, quadratic forms and Galois cohomology. With Raman Parimala, proved Serre’s conjecture II regarding the Galois cohomology of a simply-connected semisimple algebraic group when such a group is of classical type

1951 – Color TV Day * – CBS broadcasts Premiere, the first commercial color television program, and Pabst airs the first beer commercial in color

1952 – Kristina Abelli Elander born, Swedish painter, creator of large-scale room installations, and figures in ceramics and textiles

Superbruden & Dödskallen – 1976 – by Kristina Abelli Elander

1954 – Sonia Sotomayor born, American lawyer and judge, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 2009. She is the first woman of Puerto Rican heritage to serve on the Supreme Court. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1976, and earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was editor of the Yale Law Journal. Sotomayor was an assistant district attorney in New York City (1979-1984) before entering private practice. She has been a member of the boards of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board. In 1992, Sotomayor was nominated by George H. W. Bush to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, then nominated by Bill Clinton in 1997 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but the Republican majority slow-walked her nomination, and she wasn’t confirmed until 1998. On the Second Circuit (1998-2009), Sotomayor heard appeals over 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions, before being nominated to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama. She is identified on the court with concern for the rights of defendants, calls for reform of the criminal justice system, and strongly dissenting opinions opposing the conservative majority on issues of race, gender and ethnic identity

1962 – U.S. Supreme Court rules that the use of an unofficial, nondenominational prayer in New York public schools was unconstitutional

1967 – Tracey Spicer born, Australian newsreader and award-winning journalist; co-host of Network Ten Eyewitness News (1995-2006). She was dismissed from the network in 2006 after returning from maternity leave when her second child was two months old. She threatened to file suit for discrimination, then settled out of court. She worked as a Sky News Australia news presenter (2006-2015). In 2015, she produced a documentary on the plight of women in Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, and India. Spicer writes the Mama Holiday column for Traveller Magazine’s Sunday edition, and a column for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. She is also a freelance writer, public speaker, and a supporter of the World Wide Fund for Nature, Dying With Dignity, and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, and is an advocate for the NOW campaign in Australia, similar to the #MeToo movement in the U.S.

1969 – The Hollies record “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” with Elton John playing piano

1970 – Ariel Gore born, author and editor-publisher of Hip Mama, an alternative press publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood

1973 – Former White House Counsel John Dean testifies before the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee

1974 – Nisha Ganatra born in Canada of Indian subcontinent ancestry, film director, producer, screenwriter and actress, best known for her films Chutney Popcorn, Cosmopolitan and Late Night

1991 – The Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence

1993 – Kim Campbell is chosen as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and becomes the first woman Prime Minister of Canada

1993 – Tansu Çiller takes office as the first woman Prime Minister of Turkey

1996 – Independence Day, starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman, premiers in Los Angeles

1998 – In Clinton v. City of New York, U.S. Supreme Court rejects a presidential line-item veto law as unconstitutional

2011 – The first World Vitiligo Day * is sponsored by the Vitiligo Support and Awareness Foundation (VITSAF), after being invisioned by Steve Haragadon, and developed by VITSAF Executive Director Ogo Maduewesi. Vitiligo is a skin disorder that causes a loss of pigmentation in the skin, creating a splotchy effect

2014 – In Riley v. California, U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously that police cannot examine the digital contents of a cell phone without a court order

2016 – The Nigerian army reports that it has rescued 5,000 people — mostly women and children — held hostage by Boko Haram terrorists for more than six years. The soldiers evacuated four remote villages in Borno, a state in the northeast region of Nigeria where Boko Haram has been active since 2009. The militant organization has killed more than 20,000 people, kidnapped and enslaved girls and women, and caused 2.5 million in Nigeria and nearby countries to flee their homes as refugees

2019 – The Spanish Supreme Court in Madrid overturned a lower court’s verdict in a case which had launched a firestorm of protest throughout the country. During the Pamplona bull runs in 2016, an 18-year-old Spanish woman was gang-raped by five men who were part of a group calling themselves la manada (the wolf pack). They then left her lying there, having stolen her mobile phone so she couldn’t immediately call for help. After that, they bragged about it on their Whatsapp group, posting photos and videos. In the first trial, a chat app showing the men discussing buying date rape drugs was ruled inadmissible, but photos of the victim at parties on her social media, taken in the months after the attack, were allowed, and helped the defense lawyers smear her as a “seductress.” They argued that she was “consenting” because she appeared frozen in a video clip of the 30-minute attack, and wasn’t resisting, so a lesser charge of sexual abuse was applied instead of rape. The men were sentenced to nine years in prison. Women across Spain poured into the streets to protest the verdict, and against a court ruling that the convicted men could be released on bail while a higher court studied their case. They chanted Tranquila hermana, aquí esta tu manada (Don’t worry sister, we are your wolf pack). In the retrial, the Supreme Court found the men guilty of rape, and raised their sentences from 9 years to 15 years in prison. Isabel Rodriguez, the public prosecutor on the case, said: “You can’t ask victims to act in a dangerously heroic way.”

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