August 2 is

Albariño (wine) Day

Coloring Book Day *

Ice Cream Sandwich Day

Take a Penny/Leave a Penny Day

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MORE! Aino Kallas, James Baldwin and Isabelle Allende, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Azerbaijan – Day of Azerbaijani Cinema

Costa Rica – Virgen de los Angeles
(Patron Saint)

North Macedonia – Ilinden & Republic Day **

Russia – Paratroopers Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

338 BC – Phillip II’s Macedonian army defeats combined forces of Athens and Thebes

216 BC – Hannibal’s Carthaginian army wins Battle of Cannae against Romans

1260 – Kywaswa born, King of Pagan in Burma (now Myanmar); his reign lasted from 1289 to 1297, but he only ruled Pagan City and its immediate surroundings, after the 250-year-old Pagan Empire collapsed when his father Narathihapate was assassinated by his older brother Thihathu in 1287

1343 – Breton War of Succession: After her husband is beheaded for treason after a trial where no evidence against him is publicly demonstrated, Jeanne de Clisson outfits three ships, all black-hulled with red sails, naming her flagship My Revenge. She forms an alliance with the English as a privateer, becomes ‘the Lioness of Brittany’ and gains a reputation for decapitating captured French nobles, in her quest to be avenged against French King Phillip VI and her husband’s accuser, Charles de Blois

1610 – Henry Hudson sails into the bay which will be named after him

1754 – Pierre-Charles L’Enfant born in France, American engineer, architect and city planner; initial designer of Washington DC

1775 – Josè Angel Lamas born, Venezuelan composer

1776 – Continental Congress delegates begin signing the Declaration of Independence

1790 – The first U.S. census begins

1798 – British Royal Navy under Horatio Nelson defeats Napoleon in Battle of the Nile

1824 – Fifth Avenue is opened in New York City

1834 – Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi born, French sculptor; Statue of Liberty designer

1835 – Elisha Gray born, co-founder of Western Electric Manufacturing Company; develops a telephone prototype

1858 – The first mailboxes are installed along streets in Boston and New York City

1858 – Control of the Dutch East India Company is ceded to Great Britain

1858 – Catharina van Rennes born, Dutch composer and music educator; composed music for the International Alliance meeting of the Woman’s Suffrage movement

1866 – Charles Francis Adams III (“Deacon”) born, Massachusetts Historical Society president, heads campaign to restore the USS Constitution and open her to the public; skipper of 1920 America’s Cup defender Resolute; U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1929-1933); great-grandson of John Quincy Adams

1869 – Japan’s Shinōkōshō class system is abolished during Mejii Restoration

1870 – Tower Subway, world’s first underground tube railway, opens in London

1871 – John French Sloan born, American painter, etcher and lithographer

Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, by John French Sloan – 1912

1873 – Clay Street Hill Railroad begins operating first cable car line in San Francisco

1876 – “Wild Bill” Hickok is shot dead while playing poker in a Deadwood, SD saloon

1878 – Aino Kallas born, notable Finnish-Estonian author, who wrote in both Finnish and English; her trilogy, Barbara von Tisenhusen, Reigin Pappi (The Pastor of Reigi), and Sudenmorsian (The Wolf’s Bride) exemplifies her recurring theme of Eros leading to tragedy or death

1884 – Romulo Gallegos born, Venezuelan novelist and politician; first cleanly-elected president of Venezuela in its history (1947), but only served from February to November 1948, then overthrown by a military coup d’état and went into exile until 1958, when he was awarded Venezuela’s National Literature Prize for La doncella

1887 – Rowell Hodge patents barbed wire

1891 – Sir Arthur Bliss born, English composer and conductor; known for orchestral music, and compositions for the ballet and motion pictures; Master of the Queen’s Music in the 1950s; Director of Music for the BBC during WWII; recipient of 1963 Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal

1892 – Charles Wheeler patents the first escalator

1894 – Bertha Maria Lutz born, Brazilian zoologist, botanist, politician, diplomat, and leading figure in the Pan American feminist and human rights movements; the first woman appointed as head of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro (1919). She reinvigorated the campaign for Brazilian women’s suffrage, founding the League for Intellectual Emancipation of Women in 1919, and the Brazilian Federation for Women’s Progress in 1922. Brazilian women won the right to vote in 1932. By 1933, Lutz had obtained a law degree from Rio de Janeiro Law School, and went to the Inter-American Conference of Motevideo, Uruguay, where she introduced several proposals, including calling for the Inter-American Congress of Women to focus on gender equality in the workplace; in 1936, she became a member of the Brazilian congress, one of the few congresswomen at the time, where she presented an initiative to create a committee to analyze every Brazilian law and statute to ensure they did not violate the rights of women. But when Getúlio Vargas was reinstated as dictator in 1937, he suspended parliament, ending going forward with the project. Lutz was one of four women in San Francisco in 1945 to sign the United Nations Charter, and was vice president of the Inter-American Conference of Women (1953-1959). She continued to be an active member of the commission, in later years advocating for some rights for indigenous women. In 1975,  she attended the International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City, the year before she died, at age 82

1896 – Sarah Tilghman Hughes born, American federal judge, first woman to swear in a U.S. President, Lyndon Johnson, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated

Sarah Tilghman Hughes with President Lyndon Johnson

1903 – The Ilinden *– The Preobrazhenie Uprising against the Ottoman Empire begins

1907 – Mary Hamman born, American writer, and editor for Pictorial Review, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, and editor-in-chief for Bride & Home. She also worked for LIFE magazine, as the modern living editor, one of the “trio of formidable and colorful women” at LIFE, with Mary Letherbee, the movie editor, and Sally Kirkland, the fashion editor. They ran the “back of the book” for Ed Thompson, the managing editor; when he went on to found Smithsonian magazine, Hamman contributed pieces for its Back Page

1918 – Canada’s first general strike begins in Vancouver BC

1923 – V.P. Calvin Coolidge becomes U.S president when Warren G. Harding dies

President Calvin Coolidge, wearing a black mourning armband, two days
after the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding on August 2, 1923

1924 – James Baldwin born, author and playwright; The Fire Next Time

1925 – John Dexter born, distinguished British stage and opera director at the National Theatre, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York

1932 – American Carl D. Anderson discovers the positron (the electron antiparticle)

1934 – Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany

1937 – The Marihuana Tax Act effectively renders marijuana illegal

1939 – Albert Einstein signs letter to FDR urging U.S. atomic weapons research

1940 – Bekolari Ransome-Kuti born, Nigerian physician know for his work as a human rights activist; after earning his medical degree at Manchester University, he returned to Nigeria, where soldiers under orders from military ruler Olusegun Obasanjo destroyed his medical clinic, killed his mother, and stormed his brother’s nightclub. He became chair of the Lagos branch of the Nigerian Medical Association and its national deputy, leading a campaign against the lack of drugs in hospitals. In 1984, under the government of General Buhari, both he and his brother were arrested, and jailed, and the medical association was banned. In 1985, Buhari was deposed, and they were released.  Ransome-Kuti became one of the founders of Nigeria’s first human rights organization, the Campaign for Democracy, and opposed the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. In 1995, a military tribunal sentenced him to life in prison. Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience. He was freed in 1998 following the death of Abacha. Ransome-Kuti was a fellow of the West African College of Physicians and Surgeons, a leading figure in the British Commonwealth’s human rights committee, chair of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights and executive director of the Centre for Constitutional Governance

1942 – Isabelle Allende born in Peru, Chilean ‘magic realist’ author; widely read Spanish language author of The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts; she became an American citizen in 1993. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and letters in 2004; honored with the Chilean 2010 National Literature Price, and the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Barak Obama

1942 – Nell Irvin Painter born, American historian and biographer, whose field is American Southern history of the 19^th century; her book, The History of White People, was a New York Times bestseller

1943 – Jewish uprising fails at Nazi Treblinka extermination camp

1943 – Rose Tremain born, English historical novelist, short story writer, and academic. She taught creative writing (1988-1995) at University of East Anglia, and later became the school’s Chancellor (2013 -2016). Tremain has been honored with the 1999 Whitbread Award for Music and Silence, the 1994 Prix Femina Étranger and the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, both for Sacred Count

1944 – The Republic * of Macedonia is declared

1947 – Ruth Bakke born, Norwegian organist, composer and music theorist

1955 – The USSR tests a nuclear device in Kazakhstan

1962 – Robert Zimmerman legally changes his name to Bob Dylan

1963 – The U.S. announces to the UN that it will suspend all sales of arms and military equipment to South Africa, effective August 7^th. The UN Security Council had adopted Resolution 181, calling upon all member states to cease the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition and military vehicles to South Africa. The arms embargo was made mandatory in 1977

1964 – North Vietnamese may have fired on USS Maddox in Gulf of Tonkin

1967 – In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger premieres

1967 – Aline Brosh McKenna born in France, American screenwriter and producer; noted for screenplays for Laws of Attraction, The Devil Wears Prada and We Bought a Zoo

1972 – The price of gold reaches a new record of $70 an ounce in London

1989 – Pakistan is re-admitted to Commonwealth of Nations after democracy is restored. Benazir Bhutto becomes Prime Minister, the first woman head-of-state in an Islamic country

1989 – The Mass Democratic Movement in South Africa begins a defiance campaign by challenging the segregation of hospitals, leading to the admission of over 200 Black South Africans to former Whites-Only hospitals

1990 – Iraq invades Kuwait, and President George H.W. Bush orders U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia

1999 – The Sixth Sense premieres, starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment

2007 – Mattel, the largest toy company in the U.S., announces the first of what would  become five recalls involving 21 million toys, almost all manufactured in China, because of lead contaminants

2011 – President Obama signs legislation to avert an unprecedented national default

2013 – Responding to the Supreme Court decision in U.S v. Windsor that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional, the U.S. State Department announces it will begin granting U.S. entry visas to foreign spouses of U.S. citizens in same-sex marriages, and visa applications of foreign same-sex couples will be considered jointly

2016 – The U.S. Military announces an ongoing airstrike campaign against ISIS, focusing on Sirte in Libya, with the approval of the Libyan ‘unity government’, one of the three competing governments claiming to be Libya’s legitimate government

2018 – The Trump administration believes the American Civil Liberties Union, not the government, should find undocumented immigrant parents who were deported before they could be united with children separated from them at the Mexican border, according to court documents filed by Department of Justice lawyers. The administration reunited over 1,400 children with their parents, out of a total of about 2,500, by a July 26 court-imposed deadline. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who set the deadline, gave the government more time to reunite families in complicated cases, including 431 in which the parents had been deported. DOJ lawyers wrote that the government would provide identifying information, and the ACLU “should use their considerable resources” to contact those parents. The ACLU responded that the government should take “significant and prompt steps” to find the parents

2018 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern returned to work, following six weeks of maternity leave after giving birth to her first child, daughter Neve Te Aroha. “I feel like I’ve been gifted by the New Zealand public, by my team and with the help of the acting prime minister this time to be with Neve, which has been wonderful,” Ms Ardern told TVNZ. “But of course, this is a unique circumstance and I’m really very keen to get back to work.” Ms Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford, a television presenter, will be a stay-at-home dad, allowing her to focus on running the country. It is, she says, a privilege many other women do not have. “I’m very very lucky,” she said. “I have a partner who can be there alongside me, who’s taking up a huge part of that joint responsibility because he’s a parent too, he’s not a babysitter.” She had said when she announced in January that she and her partner were expecting: “I am not the first woman to multi-task. I am not the first woman to work and have a baby – there are many women who have done this before.” During her leave, she continued to read papers and consult on significant issues. 

Jacinda Ardern with daughter Neve at 2020 Waitangi Day celebrations

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