July 14th is

Grand Marnier Day

Mac and Cheese Day

Shark Awareness Day

National Tape Measure Day *

Pandemonium Day
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MORE! Gertrude Bell, Gustav Klimt and Rawya Ateya, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

France: Bastille Day

Honduras – Honduran’s Day

Iraq – Republic Day

Ireland – National Commemoration
(of all Irish people killed in wars)

Sweden –
Crown Princess Victoria’s Birthday

United Kingdom – Emmeline Pankhurst Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

756 – Tang Dynasty, China: rebellion instigator General An Lushan leads his army toward capital city Chang’an; Emperor Xuanzong flees, which costs him his throne

An Lushan

926 – Emperor Murakami born; his reign lasts from 946 to 967

1223 – King Philip II dies, his son Louis VIII becomes King of France (1223-1226), but Louis becomes ill and dies in November 1226 at age 39, and his son, Louis IX, becomes king at age 12, with his mother, Blanche of Castile, as regent

Coronation of French King Louis VIII and Blanche of Castille

1430 – The Burgundians remand Joan d’Arc to Bishop Cauchon, of Beauvais

1494 – Poliziano born as Angelo Ambrogini, Italian Renaissance poet and classical scholar; instrumental in the divergence of Humanist Latin from medieval norms; noted for translations of  poetry by Catullus and sections of Homer’s Iliad

1602 – Cardinal Mazarin born in Naples, Italian cardinal, diplomat and politician who was the successor to Cardinal Richelieu as the Chief Minister of State (1642-1661) to the French Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV; his personal library was the foundation of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, the oldest public library in France, and one of the richest collections of rare books and manuscripts in Europe

Bibliothèque Mazarine Salle de lecture

1671 – Jacques d’Allonville born, French astronomer and mathematician, who witnessed a total solar eclipse with Edmond Halley in 1715, during which both men observed flashes of light from the moon’s dark surface, which they noted as fulminations

1769 – Gaspar de Portolá and his men establish a base in Northern California

1789 – French Revolution – Parisians storm the Bastille to release prisoners

Storming of the Bastille 1789 by Houel

1790 – Celebration in Paris of national reconciliation in the Fête de la Fédération

1795 – The French Nation Convention votes “La Marseillaise” France’s national anthem

1795 – Eleanor Anne Porden born, British Romantic poet; best known for her epic poem, Cœur de Lion, or The Third Crusade, published in 1822. When the explorer John Franklin proposed to her, she made her acceptance conditional on his acquiescence to her continuing her career as a poet after their marriage. They wed in 1823, and she gave birth to a daughter in 1824, but childbirth accelerated the advance of the tuberculosis from which she suffered. She insisted that her husband not let his concerns for her health impede his career, and he set off on his second Arctic Land expedition shortly before she died at age 29 in 1825

1798 – U.S. Congress passes the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writing about the federal government; the Democratic-Republicans win the 1800 election, and allow the act to expire in 1800

1853 – The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, the first major ‘World’s Fair’ in the U.S., opens in New York City

1861 – Kate M. Gordon born, American activist, daughter of parents who were both advocates of equality between the sexes. She was a civic leader and prominent advocate of woman’s suffrage in the Southern U.S.; in 1896, she joined the Portia Club, a New Orleans women’s rights group, and became co-founder with her sister Jean of the Equal Rights Association Club; she was the National American Woman Suffrage Association corresponding secretary (1901-1909); campaigned and raised funds for the first Louisiana hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis (1909-1913); organizer of the 1913 Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, and headed the 1918 Louisiana suffrage campaign, the first statewide effort in the American South

1862 – Gustav Klimt born, Austrian symbolist painter, leading figure in the Vienna Secessionist movement

Three Ages of Woman – Mother and Child – detail, by Gustav Klimt

1862 – Florence Bascom born, American geologist; in 1893, she was the first woman to receive her PhD from Johns Hopkins University (The trustees at Hohn Hopkins refused to grant the degree to the first woman completed her PhD studies at John Hopkins in 1882). In 1895, she launched the geology department at Bryn Mawr College. Bascom was the first woman to work as a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey (1896), the first woman to present a paper before the Geological Society of Washington (1901), and first woman to be made a fellow of the Geological Society of America (1924). There wasn’t another woman elected to the society until after 1945. Bascom was an expert in crystallography, mineralogy, and petrography. She is known for inventing techniques that used microscopic analysis in the study of the oil-bearing rocks. Bascom died in 1945 at age 82

1866 – Juliet Wytsman born, Belgian Impressionist painter, noted for her landscapes and paintings of gardens

Paysage – Juliette Wytsman

1868 – National Tape Measure Day * – Alvin J. Fellows patents “improvements for tape measures” including a way to make them retractable

1868 – Gertrude Bell born, British author, archaeologist, explorer, mapmaker, public administrator and spy; influential in the establishment of Jordan and Iraq; traveled extensively in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia (1892-1913); in 1915, her knowledge of the region and fluent Arabic was tapped by British Army Headquarters in Cairo; during WWI, she was the only woman political officer in the British forces, given the title “Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo,” then “Oriental Secretary”; she witnessed the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, reporting that in Damascus, “Turks sold Armenian women openly in the public market,” and in Ras al-Ain in Northern Syria, “the desert cisterns and caves were filled with corpses.” When the war ended, she was assigned to analyze the Mesopotamian situation – after ten months, she presented an official report entitled “Self Determination in Mesopotamia,” but British Commissioner Arnold Wilson wanted an Arab government “under the influence” of British officials who would have the real power and control. A compromise was reached, mainly due to the British government’s desire to cut costs in the Middle East: the British installed Faisal bin Hussein, a trusted ally who had commanded Arab forces with T.E. Lawrence, as the first King of the newly kluged-together nation of Iraq. Bell was an integral part of the Iraqi administration in its infancy, described as “one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection.”

1874 – The Great Chicago Fire destroys 47 acres of the city

1912 – Woody Guthrie born, American Folk and Protest Singer-Songwriter

1918 – Ingmar Bergman born, highly influential Swedish filmmaker; The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957)

1921 – Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Mass., of killing a shoe company paymaster and his guard

1927 – First commercial airplane flight to Hawaii

1929 – Jacqueline, comtesse de Ribes, born, French aristocrat, ready-to-wear fashion designer, theatrical and television producer, philanthropist and ecological activist; producer of the inaugural play at the Recamier Theatre in 1958, then managed the International Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas after the death of the Marquis (1961-1966). She was co-producer in 1966 of a three-part series for French television, then co-produced Eurovision programs for UNICEF in the 1970s; in 1974 in the Balearic Islands, she became an early advocate for nature conservation and ecology, then orchestrated an international campaign to safeguard the migratory bird refuge on the island of Espalmaor

1938 – The Manifesto of Race is published, preparing the way for the enactment in October of the Racial Laws in Fascist Italy; the manifesto declares: Italians are descendants of the Aryan race; all non-Aryan races are inferior; Jews should be banned from many professions; and sexual relations/marriages between Italians and Jews or Africans be prohibited

1940 – Susan Howatch born, English author and academic; noted for family saga novels covering sequential periods of history, and her Starbridge series, novels about the Church of England, centering on the fictional Anglican diocese of Starbridge

1942 – Helen O’Connell and Bob Eberly sing their last duet together, recording “Brazil” with the Jimmy Dorsey band

1946 – Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care is first published, quickly becoming a bestseller, and one of the most widely-discussed books ever published

1946 – Sue Lawley born, veteran English broadcaster; BBC Plymouth subeditor and freelance reporter (1970-1972); reporter/presenter on BBC news magazine Nationwide (1972-1975); anchor on nightly news programme Tonight (1975), then rejoined  Nationwide as one of its two anchors (1976-1983); became anchor on Six O’Clock News      (1984-1989); introduced the BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures

1947 – Claudia J. Kennedy born, U.S Army officer; first woman to reach the rank of three-star general; she retired in 2000 after 31 years of military service, in the fields of intelligence and cryptology

1953 – Martha Coakley born, American Democratic lawyer and politician; Attorney General of Massachusetts (2007-2015; District Attorney of Middlesex County (1999-2007)

1956 – Fats Domino hits top of the charts with “I’m in Love Again”

1957 – Rawya Ateya takes her seat in Egypt’s National Assembly, first woman parliamentarian in the Arab world

1960 – Jane Goodall begins her study of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream Reserve

1960 – Anna Bligh born, Australian politician; leader of  the Queensland Labor Party (2007-2012); first woman Premier of Queensland (2007-2012); Member of Queensland Parliament for South Brisbane (1995-2012)

1962 – Vanessa Lawrence born, British geographer, public speaker and first woman Director-General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency (2000-2014); Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors and of the Royal Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; co-founder and inaugural chair of the Association of Chief Executives (ACE)

1965 – NASA space probe Mariner 4 flies by Mars, photographing the planet

1976 – Capital punishment is abolished in Canada

1979 – Demonstrations continue against increasing rice prices in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, led by the opposition party Progressive Alliance of Liberia

1989 – Cyndi Lauper’s “My First Night Without You” is the first closed-captioned video

1993 – Aeroflot begins non-stop flights between New York and Moscow

2012 – The Ana Cecilia arrives in Havana Bay, carrying the first U.S. government-sanctioned shipment of humanitarian aid to Cuba, and ending the 50-year trade embargo imposed by the Kennedy administration in 1962. In 2013, the service stopped, due to the shipping company’s financial problems, and slow distribution after goods were landed

Ana Cecilia – Frank Reyes photo

2015 – NASA’s spaceprobe New Horizons performs the first flyby of Pluto, completing the initial survey of the Solar System

2017 – Chinese authorities announce that imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo has died of multiple organ failure stemming from his battle with liver cancer. Foreign doctors who visited Liu earlier in the hospital where he was being treated said
he could safely travel abroad for treatment, but the Chinese government refused to release him, saying he was receiving adequate treatment in China.  Liu Xiaobo was a writer, human rights activist, philosopher and professor, who was known for his participation in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.  He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, while serving his fourth term in prison, the first Chinese citizen awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China. The Chinese government denied him the right to have a representative collect the Nobel Prize on his behalf

2018 – U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issued an exasperated response to a last-minute filing submitted by the Justice Department, about the Trump administration’s plan to comply with his order to reunite migrant families separated at the border. The filing makes clear the Department of Health and Human Services “either does not understand the court’s orders or is acting in defiance of them,” wrote Sabraw, a George W. Bush appointee. “HHS appears to be operating in a vacuum, entirely divorced from the undisputed circumstances of the case,” he added, blasting the DOJ for “attempting to provide cover” for inexcusable HHS conduct 

2018 – Andrea Hernandez, a 23-year-old Oregon woman, survived for a full week after her SUV crashed over a 200-foot cliff on California’s coast. Hernandez was driving to visit her sister when she went missing near Big Sur. Her family filed a missing person report, but she was ultimately discovered by hikers who happened to be in the area. Hernandez suffered a concussion and a shoulder injury, but authorities said she was able to walk and talk when they found her. While awaiting rescue, she used her car’s radiator hose to collect water from a stream to stay alive.

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