August 14th is

Navajo Code Talkers Day *

Creamsicle Day

National V-J Day *

World Lizard Day

Social Security Act Day *

W0rld Calligraphy Day

___________________________________

MORE! Amaza Meredith, Max Klein and Halle Berry, click

___________________________________

WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Dominican Republic – Engineer’s Day

Falkland Islands – Falklands Day

Indonesia – Pramuka Day
(Indonesian scouting organization)

Morocco – Oued Ed-Dahab Day
(Return of province from Spanish control)

Pakistan – Independence Day

Saint Helena – Tristan da Cunha:
Anniversary Day

Vatican City – Assumption Vigil

___________________________________

On This Day in HISTORY

1040 – Scottish King Duncan I killed in battle by his first cousin Macbeth, who becomes his successor as King of Scotland

1183 – Taira no Munemori and the Taira clan take young Emperor Antoku and the three sacred treasures and flee to western Japan to escape from the Minamoto clan

Taira no munemori mikazuki osen ebizako no ju (Actors playing
Taira no Munemori, Mikazuki Osen, and Ebizako no Ju), painted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

1248 – Rebuilding of Cologne Cathedral begins after it is destroyed by fire. It is not completed until August 14, 1880

1297 – Japanese Emperor Hanazono born, ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1308, at age 11 after Emperor Go-Nijō died unexpectedly at age 24. His father, the retired Emperor Fushimi, and retired Emperor Go-Fushimi both exerted influence as cloistered emperors during his reign. In 1318, he abdicated to his second cousin, who became the Emperor Go-Daigo. In 1335, Hanazono became a Buddhist monk of the Zen sect, and his palace became the temple of Myōshin-ji.  He excelled at waka (poetry) composition, and became an important member of the Kyōgoku School, and also left a diary Hanazono-in-Minki (Imperial Chronicles of the Flower Garden Temple or Hanazono-in). Hanazono died in 1348, at the age of 51

1552 – Paolo Scarpi born, Italian historian, prelate, scientist and statesman on behalf of the Venice Republic; many of his writings are highly critical of the Catholic Church’s scholastic tradition

1642 – Cosimo III de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, longest-reigning duke in Tuscan history, marked by ultra-reactionary edicts against prostitution and May celebrations, and economic depression; his wife left him and went into the Convent of Montmatre, after bearing three children

1738 – Leopold Hofmann born, Austrian composer; Kapellmeister at Peterskirche (St. Peter’s Church) and St. Stephan’s Cathedral  in Vienna, where he asked for Mozart to be appointed as his assistant-Kapellmeister

1782 – Suriname forbids selling slave mothers without their babies

1802 – Letitia E. Landon born, British author and poet, known by her initials L.E.L., a popular writer in the 19th century; her first poem to appear in print was published in the Literary Gazette in 1820. Landon later became the Gazette’s chief reviewer but she also continued to write poetry, and may have carried on a secret affair with the Gazette’s editor, William Jerdan, 20 years her senior. Rumours of an affair, which grew to be rumours of multiple affairs, whether true or not, damaged her reputation. After her father’s death in 1824, she had to write to help support her family. She married George Maclean, governor of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1838, and they sailed to Ghana shortly after the wedding. She was found dead, two months after they arrived in Africa, with a bottle of prussic acid in her hand, but no autopsy was performed. Best known for her novel Romance and Reality, and for her poetry collection, The Improvisatrice

1814 – Charlotte Fowler Wells born, American phrenologist, teacher and publisher. She  taught classes in phrenology (the study of head bumps, which at the time were believed by some to indicate the individual’s mental traits – discredited by the 1900s as pseudo-science) until 1837, when she ended teaching to help run the family business. O.S. & L.N. Fowler was a lecture bureau, museum and publishing house. As her husband and brothers travelled frequently, she was often left in charge of the business. In 1875, upon becoming a widow, she was sole proprietor and manager until 1884, when she formed a stock company, Fowler & Wells Company. She served as the new company’s president, and published the American Phrenological Journal. She was also a co-founder in 1863 and a trustee of the New York Medical College for Women, one of the first medical schools founded exclusively to train women as doctors. Susan McKinney Steward graduated as valedictorian from the school in 1869, the first African American woman to earn a medical degree in New York state, and the third black woman doctor in the U.S.

1820 – Dr. Edward Delafield opens first US infirmary exclusively for treating eye diseases in NYC

1848 – Margaret Lindsay Huggins born, Anglo-Irish astronomer and scientific investigator; her grandfather was an amateur astronomer, and shared his enthusiasm with her from an early age; she was unable to receive formal training in astronomy, but studied by reading many books, and viewing the stars, with her grandfather, and on her own with a spectroscope she constructed; she also became interested in photography. When she was introduced to astronomer William Huggins, it was the beginning of a lifetime collaboration, and they were married in 1875. They were the first to observe and identify hydrogen lines in the spectrum of the star Vega, and observed the Nova Aurigae of 1892. She was in charge of visual observations, and photography, mainly at the Tulse Hill Observatory, while they both kept meticulous notes, and he did more of the writing on publications of their findings. Beginning in the 1880s, she was listed as co-author of their publications, a rare acknowledgement for a woman at the time. They worked together for 35 years as equal partners. After Williams’ death in 1910, Margaret faced increasing health problems of her own. She donated her scientific papers to Wellesley College in the U.S., as she was a supporter of women’s education, and greatly admired the advances American women were making in education, and in opening up career opportunities for women

1851 – Doc Holliday born as John Henry Holliday, American dentist, gambler, and gunfighter; one of lawman Wyatt Earp’s deputies during his war with the Cochise County Cowboys gang in Tombstone. Holliday died of tuberculosis in 1887 at age 36

1863 – Ernest Thayer born, American writer; “Casey at the Bat”

1867 – John Galsworthy born, English novelist and playwright; 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature; The Forsyte Saga

1880 – Construction of Cologne Cathedral  is completed in Germany after 632 years

1882 – Gisela Richter born, prominent British-American classical archaeologist, art historian and author; attended Girton College (1901-1904) at the University of Cambridge, but Cambridge did not award degrees to women at that time; spent a year at the British School in Athens, then moved to the U.S. in 1905 and became an American citizen in 1917. She was hired as an assistant at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1905, was promoted to assistant curator in 1910, then to associate curator in 1922.  Richter was the Met’s first woman curator, of Greek and Roman art (1925- 1948), and one of the most influential figures in classical art history of the day; she wrote several popular books on classical art, which increased the general public’s understanding and appreciation of the subject, including Animals in Greek Sculpture: A Survey, Roman Portraits, A Handbook of Greek Art and Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes

1886 –  Arthur J. Dempster born, American physicist, built the first device for measuring charged particles

1888 – Thomas Edison’s phonograph plays a recording of Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” as a demonstration for the British press in London

1893 – Alfred Alessandrescu born, Romanian composer, conductor and pianist

1895 – Amaza Lee Meredith born, African American architect, artist and educator. Her father was a white master stair builder, and her mother was black. They were unable to marry in Virginia, so they were married in Washington DC. Her father’s business suffered, and he committed suicide in 1915, when she was 20 years old. She never received formal training in architecture both because of her race and her gender, so she became an art teacher at Virginia State College, where she was the founder of the Fine Arts Department. In spite of her lack of training, she designed homes for many friends and family; her most notable design was for Azurest South, her own home which she shared with her companion Dr. Edna Meade Colson. After teaching elementary and high school classes for several years, she moved to New York to attend the Teacher’s College of Columbia University, receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts by 1934. In 1935, she began her career at Virginia State University, and started work on Azuret South, which was completed in 1939. In 1947, she formed the Azurest Syndicate to create Azurest North, an African American leisure community of 120 lots in Sag Harbor, where several of the homes were her designs. She retired from teaching in 1958, but continued to design buildings through the 1960s

1896 – Gold discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory

1900 – A military force from eight nations lifts the siege of Peking, ending the Boxer Rebellion, which tried to purge foreigners from China

1900 – Margret Boveri born, German journalist and writer who survived an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime during WWII to become one of the best-known writers in Germany after the war. She worked for the Foreign Affairs section of the Berliner Tageblatt  newspaper (1934-1939), then was a foreign correspondent in  Stockholm and New York City for the Frankfurter Zeitung  newspaper. After the U.S. entered the war, she was interned in New York, but was returned to Europe, arriving in Lisbon in 1942, still working as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper, until it was banned in 1943. Boveri then returned to Berlin, where her apartment was destroyed by an air strike. She then worked as a report writer in the German embassy in Madrid. Although she was never a member of the National Socialist Party, she worked as freelance writer for the National Socialist weekly Das Reich (1944-1945). After the war, she was an outspoken critic of the division of Germany by the Allies into separate political zones. In 1968, she was awarded the German Critics’ Prize, and in 1970, the  Bundesverdienstkreuz, the highest civilian honour in West Germany, for promoting understanding between East and West Germany. Boveri died in West Berlin in 1975

1901 – Alice Rivaz born, Swiss author and feminist, wrote about women in art and the family including Nuages dans la main (Clouds in your Hands) and Jette ton pain (Cast your Bread)

1903 – Eduardo Mallea born, Argentine novelist, essayist and short-story writer

1909 – Winifred C. Stanley born, American lawyer and politician; as a member of the United States House of Representatives in the 1940s, she was the first to propose a bill for equal pay for equal work in HR 5056

1910 – Pierre Schaeffer born, French composer, acoustician and electronics engineer

1911 – Ethel Payne born, American writer, journalist and columnist for The Chicago Defender; “The First Lady of the Black Press” with a reputation for asking tough questions; the first African American woman radio and television commentator for a national news organization, for CBS (1972-1982); civil rights activist; associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press; inaugural recipient of the Ida B. Wells Distinguished Journalism Chair in 1973

Ethel Payne with President Lyndon Johnson

1915 – Max Klein born, American painter; creator of “paint by numbers”

1917 – China declares war on Germany and Austria during WWI

1926 – Lina Wertmüller born, Italian writer and director, first woman ever nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for her film Seven Beauties; also known for The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy and Swept Away

1932 – Lee Hoffman born, American author and editor of early science fiction and folk music fanzines. She was the editor (1950-1953) of the highly regarded science fiction fanzine, Quandry, and began publication of the Science-Fiction Five Yearly in 1951, which continued until 2006. She was assistant editor (1956-1958) on the magazines Infinity Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures, and also edited and published the folk music fanzines, Caravan  and Gardyloo. From 1966 through 1977, she wrote 17 Western novels, and 4 science fiction novels. Her book, The Valdez Horses, won the 1967 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Novel. Under the pen name Georgia York, she wrote historical romances from 1979 through 1983. She died of a heart attack in 2007

1935 – Social Security Day *- Franklin Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act

1941 – US Congress appropriated $83 million to build the Pentagon

The Pentagon in the 1940s – SHORPY photo

1941 – President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issue the Atlantic Charter, a statement of principles renouncing aggression

1941 – David Crosby born, singer-songwriter – The Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

1945 – National V-J Day *- U.S. President Truman announces Japan surrenders

1947 – Pakistan becomes independent from British rule

1953 – The whiffle ball is invented by David N. Mullany

1956 – Erica Flapan born, American mathematician, known for research in low-dimensional topology, spatial graph theory and knot theory; professor of mathematics at Pomona College in California; recipient of a 2011 Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics, from the Mathematical Association of America; became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012

1960 – A UN Peace-Keeping force replaces Belgian troops in the Republic of Congo

1966 – Halle Berry born, African American actress, producer, environmental and political activist. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Monster’s Ball, and both a Golden Globe and a Prime-Time Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Her  Executive Producer  credits include the 2017 film Kidnap, and the current television series Boomerang. She was a member of the group which successfully fought against a proposed liquefied natural gas facility to be sited in the Pacific Ocean near Malibu, and has campaigned to raise funds for women’s health and education issues. She also campaigned in 2008 for Barack Obama, and testified with Jennifer Garner before the California State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee in support of the 2013 bill to protect celebrities’ children from harassment by photographers

Halle Berry – photo by Gage Skidmore

1968 – Medy van der Laan born, Dutch Democrats 66 politician and chair or member of various councils and associations; chair of Energie Nederland, an energy company (2014 to present); member of the Supervisory Board of the Consumers Association (2007-2015); chair of the AOC council (2009-2014), a green education organization; Dutch Secretary of State for Culture and Media (2003-2006)

1969 – British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to stop sectarian violence between Protestants and Roman Catholics

1969 – Tracy Caldwell Dyson born, American chemist and NASA astronaut; Mission Specialist on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2007, and Expedition 24 crew member on the International Space Station in 2010; she completed three space walks, logging 22 hours, while repairing a malfunctioning coolant pump

1973 – U.S. bombing of Cambodia is halted

1978 – Opening  Day of the World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in Geneva, Switzerland

1980 – Workers go on strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland; this job action leads to the Solidarity labor movement

1982 – National Navajo Code Talkers Day * is proclaimed by President Reagan

1984 – Lionel Ritchie sings “All Night Long” at the closing of the L.A. Olympics

1988 – In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is admitted to Tygerberg hospital, where he is diagnosed with tuberculosis

1989 – Bon Jovi’s New Jersey album becomes the first U.S. album to be released legally in the USSR; Russian label Melodiya paid the group with a truckload of firewood since it was illegal for rubles to leave Russia

1992 – Emergency airlifts of food to Somalia begin to ease drought and warfare crisis

2003 – A widespread power blackout affects northeastern U.S and Canada

2006 – Israel ends its offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas as a U.N.-imposed cease-fire goes into effect after a month of warfare that kills over 900 people

Hezbollah stronghold, Dahiyeh, a neighborhood of Beirut, after Israeli bombing

2015 – The U.S. Embassy in Havana re-opens 54 years after diplomatic relations with Cuba were cut off

2017 – A Virginia judge denied bail to the 20-year-old Ohio man accused of killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others by ramming his car into counter-protesters during a white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Police records in Ohio reveal the alleged killer was once accused of beating and threatening his wheelchair-bound mother with a knife

2019 – Evelyn Beatríz Hernández Cruz, now age 21, is on trial for the second time in a case that highlights the aggressive criminal persecution of women in El Salvador who suffer obstetric complications. Cruz, a victim of rape, was 18 years old when she entered the outside latrine at her family home suffering diarrhoea and severe abdominal pain. She gave birth to a stillborn boy, and lost consciousness due to heavy bleeding. Her mother, a domestic worker, found Hernández passed out and covered in blood and took her to the nearest public hospital without realising her daughter had suffered an obstetric emergency. At the emergency room, medical staff called police and prosecutors. Three days later, Hernández was transferred to the women’s prison to await trial for deliberately killing her unborn baby. She insisted that she did not know she was pregnant, and occasionally menstruated after being raped. The medical coroner recorded aspiration pneumonia as the cause of death, having discovered meconium, faecal matter, in the baby’s lungs and stomach. Despite the autopsy results, in July 2017 Hernández was sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide. She was freed in February, however, after serving 33 months in an overcrowded jail, when an appeal judge quashed the conviction on the grounds that the evidence presented at trial did not prove Hernández intended – directly or indirectly – to harm the foetus. Prosecutors are now retrying Hernández on the same charge. Abortion has been illegal in all circumstances since 1998, when legislators from across the political spectrum voted to strip women of their reproductive rights without any public debate or medical consultation about the consequences. Dozens of women have since been prosecuted for homicide and manslaughter after suffering an obstetric emergency like a miscarriage or still birth.

Evelyn Beatríz Hernández Cruz

___________________________________