August 30th is

International Whale Shark Day *

Frankenstein Day *

Grief Awareness Day *

Slinky Day *

Toasted Marshmallow Day

U.N. International Day of the Disappeared *

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MORE! Anita Garibaldi, John Gunther and Luisa Moreno, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Cyprus, North Cyprus & Turkey – Zafir Bairam
(Victory Day/War of Independence)

East Timor – Consultation Day

Kazakhstan – Constitution Day

Peru – Santa Rosa de Lima (Peru’s patron saint)

Turks and Caicos Islands – Constitution Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

AD 70 – Titus ends the Roman siege of Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple, called Herod’s Temple after it was completely refurbished and expanded during the reign of Herod the Great, It stood on the site of what today is the Dome of the Rock

526 – Theoderic the Great, King of the Ostrogoths and ruler of Italy, dies; his daughter Amalasuntha takes power as regent for her 10-year-old son Athalaric. When her son dies in 534, she briefly becomes Queen, choosing her cousin Theidaha as co-ruler, but is assassinated with at the least his permission, giving Byzantine Emperor Justinian I an excuse to send his general Belisarius on an invasion of  Italy

1096 – Pope Urban II bans use of the crossbow, on pain of excommunication, against fellow Roman Catholics; still allowed for use against non-believers, heretics and heathens

1681 – English King Charles II grants William Penn a royal charter for a large tract of land in America to satisfy a debt owed to Penn’s father

1716 – ‘Capability’ Brown born as Lancelot Brown, British landscape architect, often called “England’s greatest gardener,” who designed over 170 parks

1748 – Jacques-Louis David born, French Neoclassicist painter

Self Portrait, 1794, by Jacques-Louis David

1767 – Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke born, German composer, pianist and music publisher; Direktor der Kirchenmusik in Hamburg

1780 – Benedict Arnold secretly promises to surrender West Point fort to the British

1787 – Mary Thomas born, poet and pioneering South Australian settler whose diaries and letters, published in 1915, are a detailed account of early colonial life

1797 – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is born, author of  Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein Day * honors her best-known work

1821 – Anita Garibaldi born, Brazilian comrade-in-arms and wife of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi after his arrival is Brazil. A skilled horsewoman – while pregnant, she escaped after being captured by enemies during the Battle of Curitibanos by stealing a horse; when it is shot out from under her, she waded into the river Canoas. Her pursuers assume she would drown, and left her for dead. She survived for four days without food or water before finding help, and is reunited with Garibaldi; a few months later she gave birth to their son

1835 – Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, is founded, named after then-British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2^nd  Viscount Melbourne

1836 – Houston, Texas, is founded, named after Sam Houston, hero of the Battle of San Jacinto

1844 – Emily Ruete born as Salama bint Said, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, the youngest of 36 children, and author of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar. She was fluent in Arabic and Swahili. She was taught to ride and shoot at the age of seven, and her mother, a Circassian concubine, secretly taught her to write. When her father died in 1856, she was 12 years old, and declared of age. She received a substantial monetary inheritance and a plantation with a residence. In 1859, her mother died and she received her maternal inheritance of three plantations. That same year, a dispute broke out between her brothers Majid and Barghash, who was now Sultan. Though inclined to support Majid, she was talked into supporting Barghash, and became secretary for his party because she could write. An English gunboat soon ended the dispute, but it was Barhash who was sent into exile for two years, and she spent the time keeping a low profile at one of her estates. Returned to the capital, she made up with Majid, for which Barghash and her favorite sister were unforgiving. She fell in love with a German merchant, Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, and became pregnant. In 1866, they fled aboard a British frigate to Aden, where she took Christian instruction and was baptized as ‘Emily’ prior to their marriage, but she avoided eating pork, and dreaded attending church. The child she gave birth to died when he was only a few months old, on the journey to Germany in 1867. They settled in Hamburg, and had three more children, but her husband was killed in a tram accident in 1870, leaving the family in difficult economic circumstances because authorities had denied her inheritance claims. She wrote her book to help raise money to live on. It was the first known autobiography of an Arab woman, and was published in Germany in 1886, and later in translation in the United States and Great Britain. There were rumors that Otto von Bismarck wanted to install her son as Sultan of Zanzibar, under German control. She traveled, revisiting Zanzibar, and spent time in Beirut, Lebanon, Jaffa, then returned to Germany, where she died in 1924, at age 79, from pneumonia. In 1992, her letters were published as An Arabian Princess Between Two Worlds

1852 – Jacobus Hoff born in Holland, German chemist, first winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry (1901)

1862 – Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Manassas Virginia

1871 – Ernest Rutherford born in New Zealand, English Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1908)

1893 – Huey P. Long born, “The Kingfish” of Louisiana politics; after serving as Chair of the Railroad and Public Service Commissions, he was Louisiana’s governor (1928-1932), and senator (1932-1935); assassinated in 1935 at the Louisiana State Capitol

1901 – John Gunther born, American journalist; author of Inside Europe, Inside U.S.A.,and Death Be Not Proud

1906 – Olga Taussky-Todd born in Austria-Hungary in what is now the Czech Republic, mathematician famous for over 300 research papers in algebraic number theory, integral matrices, and matrices in algebra and analysis. Both her sisters had careers in science, Iona as a consulting chemist, and Hertha as a pharmacist, and later a clinical chemist.  Olga Taussky studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, and earned her doctorate there. She attended meetings of the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism, a highly influential group of philosophers and scientists. She became well-known for her work on matrix theory, and was hired to find and correct the mathematical errors in the works of David Hilbert, so they could be collected into a volume to be presented to him on his birthday. Taussky was only unable to repair his paper on the continuum hypothesis. In 1935, she moved to England, and became a Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. During WWII, she used matrices to analyze vibrations in airplanes at the National Physical Laboratory, and wrote several articles on the subject which were published by the Ministry of Aircraft Production. She married Irish mathematician Jack Todd in 1938. In 1945, the couple emigrated to the U.S. and worked for the National Bureau of Standards. In 1957 she and her husband both joined the faculty of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. She also supervised Caltech’s first female Ph.D. in Math, Lorraine Foster. Taussky retired from teaching in 1977, but continued her correspondence with other mathematicians regarding her work in matrix theory. She was a Fellow of the AAAS, a Noether Lecturer and a recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class (1978). In 1993, the International Linear Algebra Society established a lecture series to honor the contributions to the field of linear algebra made by Taussky-Todd and her husband

1907 – Luisa Moreno born as Blanca Rosa López Rodríguez to a wealthy family in Guatemala, who became a labor organizer, political activist, and writer. While still a teenager, she organized La Sociedad Gabriela Mistral, which successfully lobbied for the admission of women to Guatemalan universities. Rejecting her elite status, she went to Mexico City to pursue a career in journalism. In 1927 at age 20, she married artist Angel De León, and they moved to New York City the following year. During a protest of the 1930 anti-Mexican movie, Under a Texas Moon, the police brutalized the protesters, and killed their leader, Gonzalo González. The murder sparked even larger protests, in which Moreno took part, and motivated her to work to unify the Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S.  When the Great Depression struck in 1929, she went to work as a seamstress in Spanish Harlem, where she organized her co-workers into a garment workers union. In 1935, she was hired by the American Federation of  Labor (AFL) as a professional organizer. She left her husband, who had become abusive, and moved to Florida with her daughter, where she unionized African-American and Latin American cigar-rollers, joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and represented  the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America  (UCAPAWA), as well as editing its Spanish-language newspaper in 1940. Moreno helped organize workers at pecan-shelling plants in Texas, and cannery workers in Los Angeles. She empowered other workers, especially women, to take leadership roles in their union organizations.  She was a main organizer of the El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (Spanish-speaking People’s Congress). She took a year off from UCAPAWA to travel throughout the U.S., visiting Latino workers on the East Coast, in the Southwest, and allying refugees of the Spanish Civil War to her cause. In 1940, she spoke before the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB). Her speech, which became known as the “Caravan of Sorrow” speech, eloquently described the lives of migrant Mexican workers. Portions of it were reprinted in Committee pamphlets, creating a legacy that lasted much longer than the speech itself.  “These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California’s industrialized agriculture, the sugar companies and the large cotton interests, that operate or have operated with the labor of Mexican workers.” She organized cannery workers in San Diego, and co-founded an employment office there. During WWII, when the defense industry refused to hire Mexicans for the higher paying jobs, she criticized their discrimination.  In 1947, she married Gray Bemis, a navy veteran from Nebraska who had been a delegate to the 1932 Socialist Party of America national convention. Bemis shared Moreno’s interest in the civil rights of Mexican Americans, and photographed many of her activities. In the late 1940s, Moreno established a San Diego chapter of the Mexican Civil Rights Committee.  During the 1950s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) conducted Operation Wetback to forcibly deport Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The operation targeted labor leaders in particular. While she was considered polite and law abiding, her activism earned her enemies. She and her husband began receiving threatening letters for their work against police brutality. She was labeled by reactionary California Senator John Tunney as a “dangerous alien,” but was offered citizenship in exchange for testifying against Harry Bridges, a Longshore and Warehouse Union leader, but she refused to be “a free woman with a mortgaged soul.” She was deported in November, 1950, on the grounds that she had once been a member of the Communist Party. Her husband went with her, first to Mexico City, and then to Guatemala, but they were forced to flee during the 1954 CIA-sponsored overthrow of progressive President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.  After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, she taught school in Cuba. She later returned to Guatemala, where she died in 1992.

1907 – Leonor Fini born, Argentinian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator and author; noted for her depictions of powerful women. She was raised in Italy by her Italian mother after her parents divorced when she was a year old. Custody battles between her parents led to sudden flights in disguises, and she was a rebellious child. At age 17, she moved to Milan, then to Paris in the early 1930s. She had no formal training in art, but knew the traditional Renaissance and Mannerist styles from her time growing up in Italy.  She had her first one-woman show in Milan in 1929, and her first major exhibition in New York in 1936.  In 1943, Fini was included in Peggy Guggenheim’s show ‘Exhibition by 31 Women’ in New York, and in 1949 Frederick Ashton  choreographed a ballet conceptualized by Fini, Le Rêve de Leonor (Leonor’s Dream), with music by Benjamin Britten. In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe.  She did the graphic illustrations for Histoire d’O (Story of O) published in 1954. ‘Father of Surrealism’ Andre Breton saw women solely as muses to inspire male genius. Leonor Fini declared, “I’m not a Muse, I’m an Artist.”

Portrait of Mrs Hasellter, 1942 – by Leonor Fini (1970s photo)

1907 – Bertha Parker Pallan born, the first Native American woman archaeologist, of Abenaki and Seneca descent, daughter of Arthur C. Parker, archaeologist and first president of the Society for American Archaeology; she worked on a dig in Nevada for the Southwest Museum, and later as an archaeologist and ethnologist for the Southwest Museum

1909 – Virginia Lee Burton born, American children’s author and illustrator; her book The Little House won a Caldecott Award; she founded textile collective Folly Cove Designers

1909 – Charles Doolittle Walcott discovers fossils near Burgess Pass, naming the site as the Burgess Shale

Charles, Sidney and Stuart Walcott working at the Burgess Shale

1912 – Nancy Wake born in New Zealand, British agent during WWII, a Special Operations Executive member who became a leading figure in the French Resistance; one of the Allies most decorated servicewomen of the war, by 1943 she was the Gestapo’s most wanted person with a 5 million franc price on her head

1912 – E. M. Purcell born, American Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1952)

1913 – Sir Richard Stone born, English Nobel Prize-winning economist (1984)

1918 – Fanni Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin; she refuses to implicate anyone else, insisting she acted alone

1919 – Kitty Wells born, American singer-songwriter and guitarist. She was a Country Music Hall of Fame inductee, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient (1991). Noted for “I Hear the Jukebox Playing” and “Whose Shoulder Will You Cry On”  

1922 – New Orleans Rhythm Kings record “Tiger Rag”

1922 – Regina Resnik, American mezzo-soprano; her international career spanned 50 years, but the New York Met was her artistic home; considered one of the greatest portrayers of Carmen

1923 – Barbara Ansell born, British physician; founder of pediatric rheumatology, developing a system of classifying childhood arthritis, and specialized in research and treatment of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

1923 – Charmian Clift born, Australian writer, essayist and memoirist; she wrote notable essays for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Herald in Melbourne (1964-1969), which were later collected and published as books; known for her memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, and her novel Honour’s Mimic; alcoholism and a disintegrating marriage contributed to her suicide in 1969 at age 44

1928 – The Independence of India League is established

1935 – Alexandra Bellow born in Romania, Romanian American mathematician who has contributed to the fields of ergodic theory, probability and analysis; 1987 Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

1935 – Sylvia Earle born, American oceanographer, advocate for educating the public about the importance of oceans as essentials environmental habitats; pioneer in use of SCUBA gear, first woman to serve as chief scientist at NOAA; co-designer and builder with Graham Hawkes of the first submersible craft to reach 3,000 foot depths; in 1986, she set the women’s record for a world solo dive depth and tied the overall record with Graham Hawkes; author of  Atlas of the Ocean: The Deep Frontier

1941 – The WWII Nazi Siege of Leningrad begins, which will last nearly 2 ½ years

1941 – Sue MacGregor born, BBC Radio 4 broadcaster; presenter of Woman’s Hour (1972-1987), the Today programme (1984-2002), and A Good Read (2003-2010)

1943 – Bonisile John Kani born, South African actor and producer, member of the Serpent Players; Kani collaborated with playwright Athol Fugard in producing his plays, which have garnered international acclaim

1944 – Dame Frances Cairncross born, British economist, journalist and academic; Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy, UCLA; chair of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Rector of Exeter College, Oxford (2004-2014); chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (2001-2007); on the staff of The Economist (1984-2004); economics correspondent (1973-1981) and staff writer (1973-1984) for The Guardian newspaper

1944 – Molly Ivins born, American columnist, political commentator, humorist and author; she was the first woman police reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, then joined the Texas Observer in 1970 and where she covered the Texas legislature. She worked for the New York Times (1976-1982) which hired her for her colorful writing style, and then tried to get her to tone it down. She returned to Texas to become a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald (1981-1991), and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (1992-2001), which was syndicated and carried by hundreds of newspapers. Her 1991 book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? was on the New York Times bestseller list for 29 weeks

1945 – WWII; Hong Kong is liberated from the Japanese by British Armed Forces

1945 – In Vietnam, the August Revolution ends as Emperor Bảo Đại abdicates, ending the Nguyễn dynasty

1951 – Dana Rosemary Scallon born, Irish singer and politician, member of the European Parliament (1999-2004) for Connacht-Ulster

1956 – In Louisiana, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens

1958 – Karen P. Buck born, British Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for Westminster North since 1997; MP for Regent’s Park/Kensington N. (1997-2010); Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport (2006)

1958 – Muriel Gray born, Scottish horror novelist, broadcaster on Channel Four’s music show The Tube, and journalist who has written for Time Out, The Sunday Herald, and The Guardian; the first woman Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the first female chair of the Glasgow School of Art board of governors; appointed to the board of trustees of The British Museum since 2015; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018; Patron of the Scottish charity Trees for Life, which is working to restore the Caledonian Forest

1958 – Anna Politkovskaya born to Ukranian parents, Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who reported on Russian political events, especially the Second Chechen War (1999-2005), which made her national and international reputation, refusing to give up reporting in spite of intimidation, arrest by Russian military forces, and being poisoned on a flight from Moscow which forced her to turn back for medical treatment.  Her post-war articles about conditions in Chechnya were re-published in book form, but her worl was mainly accessed by Russian Readers through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its often-critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. She received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published Putin’s Russia for readers in the West. She was assassinated in October 2006 in the elevator of her block of flats, which attracted international attention, but the five men arrested and sentenced to prison for the murder never revealed who ordered or paid for the killing

1960 – Kevin Oldham born, American pianist and composer; died at age 33 of AIDS

1963 – The “Hotline” between Moscow and Washington goes into operation

1963 – Sabine Oberhauser born, Austrian physician and politician; Austria’s Minister for Health and Minister for Women (2014-2017). She was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, and died in 2017

1965 – Bob Dylan releases his “Highway 61 Revisited” album

1966 – Joann Fletcher born, English Egyptologist and visiting professor at the University of York; co-founder of the York University Mummy Research Group, and author of a number of books, including The Search for Nefertiti, which covers the work of a multidisciplinary scientific team to identify one of a group of mummies discovered in 1898 as the famous queen, largely dismissed by other Egyptologists as inconclusive

1967 – Thurgood Marshall is confirmed by U.S. Senate 69-11 (with 20 not voting) as the first black Supreme Court justice; he was a passionate voice for individual rights and expanding civil rights on the Supreme Court for 24 years before retiring for health reasons

1974 – The first cooperative U.S. and Netherlands scientific satellite is launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California

1983 – Guion S. Bluford Jr. is the first African-American astronaut in space aboard the Challlenger space shuttle

1984 – Space shuttle Discovery lifts off for first voyage, deploys three communications satellites, with Judith A. Resnik aboard, who becomes the second U.S. woman in space

1985 – Anna Ushenina born, Ukrainian chess grandmaster; Women’s World Chess Champion (2012-2013)

1988 – South Africa withdraws its military forces from Angola that had been fighting on the side of Jonas Savimbi-led guerrilla forces UNITA against SWAPO (South West African People Organization), supported by Cuba. After the withdrawal, a consensus is reached between South Africa, Cuba and Angola concerning the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, and steps toward South West Africa becoming the independent country of Namibia (on March 21, 1990)

1989 – Leona Helmsley, “Queen of Mean” hotelier, found guilty of income tax evasion

1990 – George H.W. Bush tells reporters a “new world order” could emerge from the Persian Gulf crisis

1999 – East Timor votes for independence from Indonesia in UN-sponsored referendum

2005 – Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast with devastating force, killing more than 1,700 people and flooding New Orleans after the city’s levees fail

2010 – U.N. resolution establishes August 30 as International Day of the Disappeared *

2011 – The first National Grief Awareness Day * is started by Angie Cartwright on her mother’s birthday

2012 – First International Whale Shark Day – Whale Sharks are added to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species

2015 – Slinky Day * is launched to celebrate the 70^th Anniversary of the Slinky

2017 – U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel temporarily blocked Texas from enforcing a new anti-abortion law adopted after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down tougher abortion restrictions. Judge Yeakel said, “it is in the public interest to preserve the status quo” until the question of the constitutionality of this law is settled, because it could place women undergoing abortion at greater risk if the procedure known as dilation and evacuation, which Yeakel referred to as “the most commonly used and safest pre-viability second trimester abortion procedure” were banned, and the act would leave a woman and her physician “with abortion procedures that are more complex, risky, expensive, difficult for many women to arrange, and often involve multi-day visits to physicians, and overnight hospital stays.”

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