August 22nd is

Be an Angel Day *

Eat a Peach Day

Pecan Torte Day

Tooth Fairy Day

Take Your Cat to the Vet Day

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MORE! Dorothy Parker, Ray Bradbury and Althea Gibson, click

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World Festivals and National Holidays

India – Chennai and Tamil Nadu:
Madras Day *

Russia – National Flag Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

1138 – Battle of the Standard: in Yorkshire, below a mast mounted on a cart bearing a pyx (box of consecrated bread of the Eucharist) and the consecrated banner of the York minster, English forces under William of Aumale repel a Scottish Army led by King David I of Scotland

1485 – Death of English King Richard III at Battle of Bosworth Field

1639 – British East India founds city of Madras India as trading center

1642 – King Charles I calls Parliament traitors, English Civil War begins

1753 – Christian Freidrich Ruppe born in Thuringia, Dutch composer

1762 – Ann Smith Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s sister-in-law, becomes the first U.S. woman newspaper editor, for The Newport Mercury

1775 – King George III proclaims the American colonies are in state of open rebellion

1788 – Dependents of the London-based Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor arrive at a settlement the committee has arranged for them in western Africa; many of the settlers are former African slaves from America who sought refuge with the British; after the settlement is burned down by a neighboring tribe in 1789, surviving settlers move to a new site in 1791, which will become Freetown, now the capital of Sierra Leone

1827 – Josef Strauss born, son of Johann Strauss I, employed as a city of Vienna engineer, designed a horse-drawn revolving brush street sweeper, but also a poet, painter, dramatist and composer

1846 – U.S. annexed New Mexico, which included at that time most of what we now know as Arizona, because of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War

1849 – Austria launches world’s first “air raid” sending pilotless balloons against Venice

1851 – Schooner America outraces Aurora to win trophy now known as America’s Cup

1860 – Eleonore Reuss of Köstritz born, Tsaritsa of Bulgaria as the second wife of Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria; she worked as a nurse during the Balkan and First World Wars

1861 – Mary Elizabeth Wood, librarian and missionary to China, founder of the first library school in China

1862 – Claude Debussy born, influential French composer

1864 – Twelve nations sign the first Geneva Convention

1865 – William Sheppard patents liquid soap

1868 –  Maud Powell, American violinist, first American violinist to achieve international rank; awarded GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously on January 25, 2014

1893 – Dorothy Parker born, American poet, author, screenwriter and critic, known for her satirical wit; two Academy Award nominations as co-author for Best Screenplay; she won the 1929 O. Henry Award for “Big Blonde.” She died in 1967. In her will, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man she had never met. When Dr. King was assassinated less than a year later, the estate passed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Parker’s ashes are interred in a memorial garden at NAACP’s national headquarters in an urn atop a circular monument. The inscription reads: Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested “Excuse My Dust”. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people.

1900 – Lisy Fischer born in Britain, Swiss pianist and child prodigy from a talented Jewish family. She gave her first piano recital in Geneva at age eleven, and studied in Paris and Berlin. As a teenager, Fischer gave concerts and appeared as a soloist in Germany and Switzerland, and was awarded the Professor Gustav Hollaender Medal in 1920. She married Ernest Simson of Düsseldorf in 1923. Many of her concerts were aired on Swiss Radio. In her later years, after the death of her husband, she lived in England with her daughter, and died there at the age of 98

1902 – Teddy Roosevelt becomes the first President to ride in an automobile, in Hartford, Connecticut

1902 – Leni Riefenstahl born, Nazi film producer-director, noted for Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) and Olympia, two of the most technically innovative and effective propaganda films ever made, but she was arrested after WWII and classified as a “fellow traveler and Nazi sympathizer” and detained in Allied prison camps from 1945-1948, which badly damaged her reputation and ended her directing career. She spent much of the rest of her life on still photography, photographing and publishing books on the Nuba peoples of Sudan, and underwater photography

1904 –  Deng Xiaoping born, Chinese revolutionary; de facto leader of the People’s Republic of China (1978-1989), overseeing economic reforms and opening global trade

1906 – Victor Talking Machine Company begins manufacture of Victrolas, price $200

1910 – Japan formally annexes Korea

1918 –  Mary McGrory born, American journalist and columnist, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the Watergate scandal. She was a fierce opponent of the Viet Nam War, and her name was on Richard Nixon’s infamous enemies list. She began her career as a journalist in 1947 at the Washington Star, and rose to prominence because of her coverage of the McCarthy hearings in 1954, in which she likened McCarthy to a neighborhood bully. She covered both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy extensively, and was part of the press corps that traveled with RFK during his 1968 presidential campaign which ended when he was assassinated in Los Angeles.  The day after the Star went out of business in 1981, she went to work for The Washington Post. In 1995, she was honored with The Four Freedoms Award for Freedom of Speech

1920 – Ray Bradbury born, influential American science fiction and fantasy writer

1920 – Denton Cooley born, American cardiothoracic surgeon, noted for performing the first implantation of a completely artificial heart in 1969, and as a co-developer of artificial heart valves in the 1960s

1921 – Mahatma Gandhi makes a bonfire of foreign clothes

1921 – Sotiria Bellou born, Greek singer and performer, known for rebetiko style music

1922 – Theoni V. Aldredge born in Greece, American costume designer; won three Tony Awards, 11 other Tony nominations, an Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 1975 Oscar for Best Costume Design for The Great Gatsby

1928 – Karlheinz Stockhausen born, German composer, pioneer in electronic music

1932 – BBC ‘s first experimental television broadcast in England

1935 – Annie Proulx born, American journalist and author, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the U.S. National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News and the PEN/Faulkner Award for the novel Postcards

1942 – Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas signs a declaration of war against Germany and Italy; over 25,000 troops go overseas as the Força Expedicionária Brasileira

1950 – Althea Gibson becomes the first black tennis player accepted at a U.S. national competition

1953 – The  French penal colony on Devil’s Island is permanently closed

1959 – Pia Gjellerup born, Danish solicitor and Social Democrat politician; Director, Danish National Centre for Public Sector Innovation; Member of Folketinget (Parliament) since 1987; Finance Minister (2000-2001); Minister of Trade and Industry (1998-2000); Justice Minister (1993)

1964 – Martha & The Vandellas release “Dancin’ in the Streets” and The Supremes hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time with “Where Did Our Love Go”

1964 – Diane Setterfield born, British novelist and academic; noted for her Gothic romance The Thirteenth Tale, and a ghost story, Bellman & Black

1972 – Due to Rhodesia’s racist policies, the country is asked to withdraw from Olympics

1973 – Kristen Wiig born, American comedian, writer, actress and producer; began her career as a member of improvisational comedy group, The Groundlings in the early 2000s. She was a cast member of Saturday Night Live in 2005, and appeared in several films, including Knocked Up and Paul. She co-wrote the screenplay and starred in the 2011 hit comedy film Bridesmaids, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actress, and received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay

Photo by Invision/AP/REX -2017

1977 – Keren Cytter born, Israeli visual and performance artist, and novelist

1986 – Kerr-McGee agrees to pay the Karen Silkwood estate $1.36 million to settle her nuclear contamination lawsuit, which had been going through appeals for 10 years

1990 – Angry smokers block a Moscow street protesting summer-long cigarette shortages

1993 – Jayne Howard Feldman establishes Be an Angel Day * to encourage kindness

2003 – Alabama’s chief justice, Roy Moore, is suspended for his refusal to obey a federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the courthouse rotunda

2004 – Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, and another Munch painting are stolen at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway

2005 – The last Jewish settlers are escorted out of the Gaza strip by Israeli security forces, so demolition of their homesteads can begin. The average settler receives the equivalent of over U.S. $200,000 as compensation

2016 – After a suicide bombing at a Kurdish wedding killed at least 54 people, Turkish authorities issued a statement that the bombing appeared to be the work of ISIS, and Turkey would “cleanse” its borders of Islamic State militants

2018 – In the UK, research has found that girls achieving top grades in science and maths at GCSE are deterred from continuing to a higher level with such subjects, including physics, because they are affected by low confidence and an absence of peers in the classroom. As hundreds of thousands of pupils await the results of their GCSE exams, a study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, suggests that only dramatic intervention will change girls’ low take-up of physics and maths at more advanced levels. The IFS study notes that while girls have long outperformed boys at GCSE level, including in the science, technology and maths subjects known collectively as STEM, fewer girls go on to take maths and physics at A-level, and fewer continue with those subjects at a higher education level. Girls are therefore missing out on potentially highly paid careers. Women with maths degrees earn 13% more than other women graduates five years after university; women with degrees in economics, which require high levels of maths ability, earn nearly 20% more. In a pilot study investigating why girls are under-represented in maths and physics, the researchers interviewed nearly 300 girls across 40 schools predicted to achieve at least grade 7 or A in maths, physics or combined science at GCSE. The study offered girls financial scholarships in return for studying physics or maths A-levels, but the rewards made little difference. Girls are affected by many factors, including low confidence in their math and science abilities, an absence of peers in the classroom, and pressure to conform to what society considers “feminine,” research has found

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