Holy Days of Obfuscation
A select semi-secular calendar, compiled by Gregory J. Rosmaita
Neglected and forgotten events and birthdays.
Food for thought, not just worms.
January
January 3
- 1926:
- William
Loughborough, inventor, activist, actor, director, musician,
all-around visionary, and one of the few people who actually lives up
to his mononymic -- "Love" -- born.
January 4
- 1748:
- under the leadership of Sam Adams, the first
issue of the Independent Advertiser is published in Boston,
proclaiming:
Liberty can never subsist without equality. So, when men's
riches become immeasurably or surprisingly great, a People who regard
their own security ought to make strict inquiry how they came by them.
- 1809:
- Louis Braille, musician and inventor of the tactile reading system for
the blind that bears his name, born in Coupvray, France
January 6
- 1706:
- Benjamin Franklin born whilst the British and their
colonies were still ticking it old style
January 7
- 1610:
- Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa.
- 1891:
- Zora
Neale Hurston, author, anthropologist and ethnographer extrodinaire,
born in Notasulga, Alabama.
January 10
- 1924:
- percussionist, drummer, composer arranger, human-rights activist and
educator Max
Roach -- born in the Township of Newland, Pasquotank County,
North Carolina, which borders the southern edge of the Great Dismal
Swamp, although he mainly grew up in Brooklyn
January 13
- 1976
- first public demonstration of the first reading machine
capable of translating print into spoken words by inventor Ray
Kurzwiel
January 14
- 1896
- John Dos Passos -- chronicler, poet, novelist, essayist, playwright,
graphical artist and author of the imcomparable U.S.A.
trilogy -- born in Chicago. If you've never read anything by Dos Passos, check out the Project Gutenberg's
Dos Passos titles -- everything the man wrote is worthy of a reading;
you may violently disagree with him from work to work, but he has one of
the most distinctive authorial voices in american literature.
January 17
- 1706:
- Benjamin Franklin's
after-the-factual birthday
January 19
- 1809:
- Author, essayist, critic and poet Edgar
Allan Poe born
January 30
- 1911:
- Little Jazz, a.k.a. Roy Eldridge born
February
- 1970:
- Phil Schaap, jazzologist extraordinaire, broadcasts his
first show on WKCR (FM), New York City
February 4
- 1746:
- artist; composer; trans-atlantic freedom fighter; military engineer
extrodinaire; active abolitionist; national hero of Poland, Lithuania,
Belarus, and the U.S.; and namesake
of the highest
mountain in Australia, Tadeusz
Kościuszko (a.k.a. Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko, by virtue of
a double-baptism) born in the no-longer-extant town of Mereczowszczyzna (near the modern town of Kosava,
Belarus), then part of the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania, part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
February 5
- 1852:
- The Hermitage Museum in
Saint Petersburg,
Russia -- one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, opens
to the public.
- 1924:
- The Royal Greenwich Observatory begins broadcasting the hourly time signals
known as the Greenwich Time Signal or the "BBC pips".
- 1994:
- Byron De La Beckwith is convicted of the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers... 2
previous trials of Beckwith -- both held in 1964 -- had resulted in hung juries
February 8
- 1899:
- Alonzo
"Lonnie" Johnson -- father of the single-string guitar solo and one of the greatest guitarists of any
genre -- born in New
Orleans, Louisiana.
February 18
- 1930:
- Pluto (the planet, not the dog) discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, as
he studied photographs taken in January; after confirmation, news of the
discovery was telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory on March 13, 1930.
February 21
- 1828
- The first edition of The Cherokee Phoenix published.
February 23
- 1685:
- George Friedrich Händel, born in Halle, Germany
- 1848
- John Quincy
Adams dies shortly after being carried from the floor of the House of
Representatives after suffering a fatal stroke. JQA is the only ex-President
who ever served in the House. (Pre-presidency, JQA also served in the U.S. Senate and had been offered
a seat on the Supreme Court)
February 28
- 1749:
- the first edition of Henry Fielding's
incomparable The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling is published.
March
March 3
- 1924:
- Although its origins -- or, at least, its melody -- date back to
1893, Happy Birthday To You was first published on this date
as Happy Birthday to You, with
its nearly-universally familiar lyrics, in 1924 by Clayton F. Summy. The
copyright on the song is currently owned by Time-Warner (which bought the
rights in 1988) and which will not expire (at least in the U.S.) until 2030, which means that
"unauthorized public performances for pay" of Happy Birthday
to You, such as those performed by a band at a party, are technically
illegal, unless royalties are paid to the copyright holder, so the next
time you sing Happy Birthday to You, keep an eye over your shoulder
for Time-Warner's lawyers...
March 5
- 1862:
- Peter Newell, author
of Topsy-Turveys, the
Rocket
Book and the
Slant
Book, amongst other classics, as well as illustrator for his
own and others' works, born in McDonough
County, Illinois.
March 13
- 1733
- Joseph
Priestley, a man who wasted not a minute of his life, born in Birstal, West Yorkshire
March 16
- Happy St.
Harry's Day!
- Yeah, St. Harry's...
Harold was Patrick's younger brother -- sort of a medieval Indiana Jones
(substitute tonsure for fedora) in that he was deathly afraid of snakes.
Having heard tell of the plague of snakes which infested Ireland, he told
Patrick he'd catch up with him, set out in a seperate barque, took a wrong
turn, and consequently fell off the face of the earth. He's the patron
saint of liars, people with two left feet, and still holds the world's
freefall record... He's also the soggiest saint in Christendom.
March 17
- 1776:
- "Evacuation Day (Boston)": the British, under General William Howe, evacuate Boston -- the real reason why March 17 has
been a public municipal holiday in Boston for over 230 years...
- 2008:
- David Paterson becomes the first blind governor of any of the
United States upon his ascension to the governorship of New York upon
the resignation of Elliott Spitzer.
March 18
- 1837:
- Grover Cleveland -- "the man so nice, they elected him
twice", but to non-consecutive terms -- born in Caldwell, New
Jersey. actually, if presidents were elected by direct popular vote,
ol' Grover would have been the first three term
president in the history of the United States, for he won the popular
vote in every presidential election he contested: United States Presidential Election of 1884,
United States Presidential Election of 1888,
and United States Presidential Election of 1892...
- 1881:
- Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth opens
for the first time at Madison Square
Garden, New York City.
March 19
- 1895:
- Auguste and Louis Lumière
record their first footage using their newly patented cinematograph.
- 1979:
- The United States House of Representatives begins broadcasting its
day-to-day business via the cable television network C-SPAN.
March 20
- 1727:
- Sir Isaac Newton, dies in London at the age of 84.
March 25
- 1857:
- Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, patents the phonautograph, the
earliest known device for recording sound.
March 26
- 1911:
- Animator, caricaturist and director T. Hee born and named
"Thornton Hee".
March 29
- 1909:
- Pianist, composer, and singer Aubrey Wilson Mullican, better known as Moon Mullican, born
in Polk
County, Texas.
- 1943:
- Eric
Idle, author, songwriter, actor, vocalist and comedian, born in South Shields, County Durham, England.
- 1945
- Walt "Clyde" Frazier one of the greatest basketballers
ever, born in Atlanta, Georgia.
April
April 1
- 1897:
- Lucille Bogan, the raunchiest of the first wave of recorded blues
singers, and creator of the immortal Shave 'Em Dry (best heard in
its unexpurgated, originally unreleased alternate version), the Sloppy Drunk Blues and the Coffee Grindin' Blues born.
April 4
- 1915:
- Muddy Waters, neé McKinley Morganfield, born
in the Delta
April 5
- 1820:
- the incomparable Nadar, born Félix
Tournachon.
April 6
- 1792:
- George Washington casts the first Presidential veto in the
history of the United States.
- 1887:
- Anne Sullivan teaches Helen Keller the word "water"
- 1966:
- Timothy Leary, in a speech at New York
City's Town Hall,
compares LSD to a microscope, stating that:
the drug is to
psychology what the microscope is to biology.
April 7
- 1827:
- John Walker
sells the first friction
match, which he had invented the year before, thereby starting a strange
chain of events which, through a linguistic freak, became associated with a
"radical" American political movement, the Locofocos, their name being
a corruption of loco focos, in 1835, when the Equal
Rights Party merged with the Working Man's
Party. The party was so named because its members carried friction matches
on their persons to relight the gaslights when more conservative members of the
public and/or their hirelings extinguished the gas so as to prevent their
members from gathering and speaking in public and/or private places.
- 1915:
- Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan,
in Philadelphia.
- 1933:
- Declaring,
Americans deserve a drink
, FDR signs an executive order allowing the legal sale of beer in the United States, eight
months before the ratification of the
Twenty-First Amendment, repealing Prohabition
April 14
- 1866:
- Anne Sullivan,
Helen Keller's teacher,
born in Feeding Hills,
Massachusetts
April 15
- 1755
- Doctor Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language published.
April 16
- 1862:
- President Abraham Lincoln
issues the Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing 3,100 enslaved residents of
Washington, DC,
nine months before the promulgation of the far more famous Emancipation Proclamation. The date was celebrated by Washington's
African-American population from 1866 through 1901. In 2005, the
municipality of the District of Columbia re-established Emancipation
Day, as a public municipal holiday.
April 19
- 1943
- Bicycle
Day: using himself as a guinea pig, Albert Hoffman
(who lived to the hearty age of 102), ingested 250 micrograms of LSD, and
then road his bicycle home through the streets of Basel, Switzerland, on
the first intentional acid trip.
April 22
- 1707:
- Henry Fielding, the father of the modern English narrative novel, and
still one of the greatest authors ever to write in the English language,
born in Sharpham, in
Somerset, England
- 1915:
- Charles Mingus born in Nogales,
Arizona.
April 29
- 1899:
- Edward Kennedy Ellington, better known as "the
Duke", born in the segregated southern American town of Washington, DC.
- 1917:
- dancer, choreographer, poet and poineering filmaker, author,
ethnographer and ethnomusicologist Maya Deren born
Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev.
April 30
- 1896:
- The great guitarist, bluesman, preacher, and performer, the
Rev. Gary Davis born,
in Laurens, South Carolina.
May
May 8
- 1910:
- Mary Lou Williams, one of America's -- let alone jazz's -- greatest
pianists, composers, and arrangers, born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia
May 18
- 1911:
- Big
Joe Turner born in Kansas City,
Missouri
May 21
- 1904:
- Thomas "Fats" Waller begins his all-too-brief life
May 22
- 1914:
- Sun Ra
arrives on Planet Earth (Birmingham, Alabama, to be specific) from Saturn and (temporarily) adopts the nomme de terre Herman "Sonny" Blount
May 25
- Happy Venerable Bede's Day! (Anglican observance)
- aside from writing the Historia ecclesiastica
gentis Anglorum, "better" known as The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede (ca. 672 to 735), also known as the "Venerable Bede" and "The English
Doctor of the
Church", is credited with the invention of the footnote. He also re-edited the Vulgate Bible, through both comparative research and the collation
of several dispirate sources, in order to create a single volume bible; a practice which
was highly unusual at the time. Whereas before Bede, the bible had been circulated as separate books, Bede's version of the Vulgate served as the official
version of the bible for the whole of Western Christendom until
the Reformation, and remained the Catholic church's cannonical bible until
1966.
May 26
- 1926:
- Miles
Davis born.
May 27
- Happy Venerable Bede's Day! (Catholic observance)
- Whilst the Anglican church celebrates the feast of
Saint Bede, a.k.a.
"The Venerable Bede", two days
earlier, the Catholic church celebrates Venerable Bede's Day
today, May 27th, basing its calculations on historical accounts
that record the date of Bede's death as the
eve of the
Feast of the Ascension, 735, a
moveable feast
which falls 39 days after Easter Sunday.
May 28
- 1898:
- Andy Kirk, one
of swing's biggest clouds of joy, born.
June
June 1
- 1495:
- The first written record of "Scotch whiskey"
appears in the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland. Friar John Cor is
listed as distiller.
- 1869:
- The voting machine patented by Thomas Alva Edison.
- 1968:
- Helen Keller dies at the age of 87.
June 7
- 1949
- The first edition of George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four is published.
June 9
- 1934:
- Donald Duck makes his debut in the cartoon The Wise Little Hen, loudly protesting:
I have a belly-ache!
June 10
- 1772:
- Eight boatloads of Rhode Islanders take advantage of the grounding of
H.M.S. Gaspée -- a
British ship of the line which had been patroling the New England coast
attempting to interdict violators of the Navigation Acts -- to plunder and burn the ship. No individual or
group of individuals were ever charged with what the British considered
an act of piracy.
June 12
- 1664:
- The colonies of
Nieuw-Amsterdam and Nieuw-Nederland surrender to the British,
effectively ending Dutch settlement in North America, save for a brief return to Dutch
rule for approximately a year, during the Third Anglo-Dutch war (1672-1674). The settlements on the eastern side
of the Hudson River
were rechristened New York, whilst the western settlements (which not only flanked the
Hudson, but which included settlements on the Delaware River,
populated mostly by Finns and Swedes, was renamed New Jersey.
June 15
- 1775
- the colony of Delaware votes to separate all ties with the British
Parliament and King. It is no coincidence
that the vote was conducted on the anniversary of John
Lackland's signing of the Magna
Carta in 1215.
June 19
- Juneteenth
- Juneteenth commemorates the date in 1865,
upon which Union troops, under the command of Gordon
Granger, landed on Galveston Island, Texas, to take
possession of the state from the Confederates. In
one of his first formal acts, Granger
announced that the Emancipation Proclamation promised not only the freedom
of all of those held in slavery in Texas, but to assert
an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of
property between former masters and slaves
. Since 1980,
Juneteenth has been celebrated as a state
holiday in Texas.
July
July 4
- 1883
- Rube Goldberg, inventor of the Rube Goldberg
Machine and winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning,
born Reuben Garret Lucius Goldberg, in
California.
- 1900:
- Louis Armstrong's birthday
(observed)
July 8
- 1908:
- Louis
Jordan -- human being extrodinaire -- born in Brinkley,
Arkansas
July 9
- 1865
- the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is adopted
July 11
- 1938:
-
The Count Basie Orchestra opens at The
Famous Door, launching the "old testament" band's national
career, thanks to both the Decca recordings they had made during the
previous two years under the direction of producer and impressario John
Hammond, as well as the national radio broadcasts that originated from
The Famous Door.
July 20
- 1925:
- Frantz Fanon, essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary, born in
Martinique
July 28
- 1902:
- Karl Popper, father of critical rationalism and co-conceptor of falsifiability, born
in Vienna
August
August 2
- 1776
- the Declaration of
Independence (at least, the parchment version of the Declaration
preserved at the National Archives) is actually signed.
August 4
- 1901:
-
Louis Armstrong's
after-the-factual birthday
August 5
- 1735:
- New York Weekly publisher John Peter
Zenger acquited of sedition and libel charges filed by colonial New
York's governor William Cosby, in the case of The Crown v. Zenger. Zenger's attorney, the
Philadelphian Andrew Hamilton -- who represented Zenger pro bono
-- successfully defended Zenger by arguing that Zenger's articles were not
libelous because they were based on fact. This landmark decision is almost universally credited as the foundation of
the United States' principle of the "freedom of the press" and for
outlining the responsibilities of both media and government in a
functioning democracy.
- 1914:
- anniversary of the instalation of the first
stop light in Cleveland, Ohio
August 7
- 1936
- Rahsaan Roland Kirk, multi-instrumentalist (in the fullest
sense of the word) and one of the greatest reedmen ever, born in
Columbus, Ohio.
- 1854
- Henry David
Thoreau's Walden published.
- 1930:
- voiced by Margie
Hines, Betty Boop makes her screen debut as a supporting character in the
cartoon Dizzy
Dishes. In her debut, Betty is
unmistakably the character which the world would come to love, save for
her ears, which clearly reveal she began life as an anthropomorphic dog.
August 10
- 1920
- Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds record Crazy Blues;
within a month of its release, on OKeh records the 78
RPM record sold
75,000 copies, and is widely acknowledged as the "very" first
"blues ever commercially issued. (listen to Crazy
Blues via YouTube)
August 13
- 1899
- Alfred Hitchcock born
August 19
- 1906:
- Eddie Durham, guitarist, trombonist, composer, arranger,
and inventor born. The first musician to perform on an electrically
amplified guitar, Durham was also largely responsible for the "riff-based" sound that the Basie band brought to New York in
1936. Although no one seems to remember his name, his legacy lives on
whenever a guitar is plugged into an amp,
or whenever Glenn Miller's smash hit, In
the Mood, which Durham arranged, is
played.
August 21
- 1904:
- William "Bill" Basie, also known as "the
Count", born in Red Bank, New Jersey
August 24
- 1905
- Arthur "Big
Boy" Crudup born in Forest,
Mississippi
August 26
- 1898:
- William Samuel McTier, a.k.a. Blind Willie
McTell, Blind Willie, Blind Sammie and Georgia Bill -- born in Thomson, Georgia
- 1919:
- The Nineteenth Amendment passed.
August 27
- 1890:
- Man Ray, born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant
parents, who name him Emmanuel Radnitsky.
- 1909:
- Lester Young, the "President of the Tenor Saxophone",
born in Woodville, Mississippi.
August 29
- 1898
- Preston Sturges, one of the greatest screenwriters, directors, and
producers of any era, genre and nationality, born in Chicago as Edmund Preston Biden.
- 1913
- Tarzan makes his first appearance in print
- 1920:
- Charlie "Bird" Parker enters this vale of tears. (Kansas City, Kansas,
to be exact...)
September
September 8
- 1886:
- Poet, author, sportsman, decorated war hero, and anti-war crusader, Seigfried Sassoon
born,
September 10
- 1908:
- Composer, pianist, engineer, and electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, né Harry Warnow, born in Brooklyn
- 1916:
- Roald
Dahl born
September 20
- 1976:
- New Rose recorded by Dave Vanian, Brian James, Captain Sensible, and Rat Scabies -- performing as The Damned -- at Pathway Studios, London; the song was subsequently released as a 7-inch single on Stiff Records on October 22, 1976.
- 2011:
- the proscription against openly homosexual individuals serving in the u.s. military is lifted, thereby expanding the pool of americans with an unalienable equal right to get killed for their country...
September 23
- 1926:
- John Coltrane, visionary and
saint of the African Orthodox Church, born in
Hamlet, North Carolina
September 24
- 1923:
- Theodore "Fats" Navarro, trumpeter extrodinaire, began his
all-too-short life in Key West, Florida, from which he escaped as soon as he could; "
I
don't like Key West at all,
" he later stated, "I'll never go
back.
"
September 27
- 1924:
- Earl "Bud" Powell, pianist and composer extrodinaire, born
October
October 1
- 1932:
- Albert Collins, A.K.A.
"The Iceman" and "The Master of the Telecaster", born in
Leona, Texas
October 10
- 1917:
- Thelonius Sphere Monk born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina
- 1941:
- WKCR, the radio voice of
Columbia University becomes the first station in the world to broadcast
on the FM band
October 20
- 1882
- Margaret Dumont --
the comic foil to Groucho Marx in seven of the Marx Brothers films
-- born in Brooklyn, New York... Groucho called Dumont (born Daisy
Juliette Baker)
practically the fifth Marx brother.
- 1906:
- Crockett Johnson, author of (amongst other classics of
English literature) Harold
and the Purple Crayon and creator of Barnaby and Mr. O'Malley,
born -- and named David Johnson Leisk -- on East
58th Street, in New York City.
October 21
- 1912:
- Don
Byas, one of the greatest artists to ever pick up a tenor sax,
and a key (if largely unsung) figure in the birth of bop, born in Muskogee, Oklahoma
October 31
- 1587:
- Leiden University's Library opens
November
November 2
- 1979:
- the Damned smash it up
second time around with the release of the perfect album Machine Gun Etiquitte
November 5
- 1855:
- Eugene V. Debs -- five-time presidential candidate (in
1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920) of the Socialist
Party of America. Debs' 1912 campaign was his and the Socialist Party of
America's most successful; Debs received 6 percent of the popular vote for
president. In 1920, Debs ran for president whilst imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, on the charge of sedition for a speech
denouncing American participation in World War I;
that he was still imprisoned 2 years after the war ended, was due in no
small part to the Supreme Court's ruling against him, in which Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr., famously wrote that
free speech does not include:
the right to shout 'fire' in a crowded
theater.
Debs was finally released from prison on December 25, 1921,
when President Warren G. Harding commuted Debs'
sentence to time served, thereby releasing Debs from his imprisonment.
As a fellow socialist once stated of Debs, That old man with the
burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the
brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as
he's around I believe it myself.
- 1917:
- In the case of Buchanan versus
Warley
(245 U.S. 60),
the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously
declares a local ordinance compelling racial segregation of residential housing in Louisville, Kentucky
unconstitutional in respect to the
Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution,
and therefore a violation of individuals' civil rights.
November 10
- 1690:
- William Hogarth, born
- 1776:
-
Commander Johannes de Graaff, governor of the Dutch island
of Sint
Eustatius orders a return cannonade upon receiving a salute from a
visiting American brig, the Andrew Doria -- the first international acknowledgment of the
independence of the United States. The British took offence -- not only to
the recognition accorded a ship flying the flag of the Thirteen Colonies,
but to the continued openess of Sint Eustatius to
American ships (such as the Andrew Doria) seeking desperately
needed arms, ammunition and other war material in defiance of both the
British navy's blockade of the Thirteen Colonies and the Dutch nation's
professed neutrality in that conflict at the time of the exchange of
salutes. When, in 1781, the British declared war on the Dutch Republic
the incident was specifically cited in the declaration of war. The
resultant Fourth Anglo-Dutch War led to British occupation of the island
nicknamed The Golden Rock. The Dutch regained
control of Sint Eustatius in 1784.
- 1931:
- Hubert Sumlin -- one of the most influential and extraordinary
electric guitarists of any era or genre -- born in Greenwood,
Mississippi.
- 1938
- LSD is
first synthesized by Albert Hofmann at a laboratory in Basel, Switzerland. LSD would not be
ingested by a human until five years later, when Doctor Hofmann used
himself as a guinea pig on what has become known as Bicycle Day.
November 17
- 1916
- historian, essayist, novelist and raconteur Shelby
Foote born in Greenville,
Mississippi
- 1983
- The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejèrcito
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) is founded in Chiapas
- 1969
- negotiators from the Soviet Union and the United States meet in
Helsinki to begin the first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
aimed at negotiating a limit on the number of strategic weapons each
country could build and maintain. SALT I led to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and an interim agreement between the
two powers to freeze development and deployment of strategic ballistic
missile launchers at existing levels.
November 22
- 1744:
-
Abigail
Adams (neé Smith), patriot, born in Weymouth,
Massachusetts
November 23
- 1936:
- on a (presumably stormy) monday, at his first recording session, held
at the Gunter Hotel
in San Antonio,
Texas for the Vocalion label , Robert Johnson records Come On in My
Kitchen.
November 24
- 1859:
- Darwin's On the
Origin of Species first published.
November 25
- 1783:
- Evacuation Day (New York City): after 7 years of
uninterrupted occupation, British military forces, under the command of
Sir Guy
Carleton, evacuate New York City along with more than 29,000 loyalists. Once a patriotic holiday in NYC -- second only to the Fourth of July --
celebration of "Evacuation Day" was a casualty of the
politico-cultural pressure exuded during the initial bonding of the "special
relationship between the U.S. and the
U.K.", once public opinion had
turned virulently anti-German in response to Imperial Germany's
policy of unrestricted submarine warfare during WWI
- 1757:
- poet, artist, visionary, nudist William Blake born at
28 Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in the Soho district of London.
- 1814:
- the age of the availability of newspapers to a mass
audience begins with the first printing of The Times (of
London) on
automatic, steam powered presses.
- 1843:
- The Kingdom of Hawai'i is officially recognized as an independent nation by
the United Kingdom and France.
November 29
- 1915:
-
Billy
Strayhorn born in Dayton, Ohio.
November 30
- 1774:
- a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin
in his pocket, Thomas Paine arrives in Philadelphia
December
December 1
- 1083:
- Anna Comnena, scholar and Byzantine princess,
is born in the Porphyra Chamber of the imperial palace of Constantinople. After
her husband’s death, Anna Comnena retired to a
convent; it was there
that she wrote the Alexiad, an account of the reign of her father, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos
of Byzantium -- a
unique historical document written from the point-of-view of the daughter of
an emperor. It is also the only known surviving Byzantine account of the First Crusade
compiled from eyewitness accounts.
- 1955:
- In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress and local civil rights activist Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man, thereby
triggering her arrest for violating the city's racial
segregation laws, precipitating the Montgomery Bus
Boycott.
- 1854:
- in what is acclaimed by many to be the birth of
Australian democracy,
more than 20 gold miners barricaded in the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat,
Victoria, are killed by state troopers; part of the Eureka Rebellion,
an uprising of miners of European descent protesting the expense of the
requisite Miner's
Licence, which the miners considered "taxation without
representation", as well as the actions of the government and its
agents -- in particular, the police and military -- during Australia's Victorian gold
rush.
- 1857:
- Joseph Conrad -- one of the indisputable masters of the English
language, even though he did not learn the language until he was in his
twenties -- is born to ethnically Polish parents in Berdichev (part of the Kiev Governorate of
the Russian Empire)
and is named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.
- 1997:
- representatives from 121 countries sign the Ottawa Treaty,
prohibiting the manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines. The United
States, the People's Republic of China, and the Russian Federation, however,
do not sign the treaty.
December 5
- 1933:
- The Twenty-First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which repeals the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or
transportation of intoxicating liquors", ratified, thereby ending
Prohibition.
December 6
- 1965:
- the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and prohibiting involuntary
servitude, except as punishment for a crime, becomes law.
December 7
- 1904:
- Clarence "Ducky" Nash, voice artist extrodinaire -- best known
for his thirty years of voicing
Donald Duck -- born in Watonga, Oklahoma, whose main street today bears his name.
December 8
- 1861:
- Georges Méliès, magician and film
pioneer, born in Paris, France. In 1913 Méliès' film company was forced into bankruptcy,
and although his company was bought by Pathé Frères, over 500 of his films on celluloid stock
were seized by the French army to be melted down into boot heels
during World War I.
December 9
- 1793:
- Noah
Webster begins publication of New York City's
first daily
newspaper, The American Minerva.
December 10
- 1815:
- the
enchantress of numbers
and the
namesake of the U.S. Department of Defense's high-level
object-oriented programming language, Ada Lovelace, born
in London to Anne Isabella Milbanke and Lord Byron.
December 11
- 1906
- Jack
Purvis, trumpeter, tombonist, arranger, composer, ship's cook, arms
smuggler, impostor, convicted robber and prison-band leader, born in Kokomo, Indiana.
December 14
- 1782
- The Montgolfier
brothers' first balloon lifts off on its first test flight.
- 1964:
- in Heart of Atlanta Motel versus United States
(379 U.S. 241), the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the U.S. Congress can use the U.S.
Constitution's Commerce Clause as a tool to fight discrimination.
December 17
- 1973:
- The American
Psychiatric Association removes homosexuality from its list of mental diseases.
- 1989:
- the first episode of the television series The Simpsons --
Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire -- airs in the United States.
December 21
- 1979:
- The Lancaster House Agreement is signed, effectively ending the era of
white minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), under Ian Smith, who had seperated the British colony of Southern
Rhodesia from the British Empire in 1965 in order to preserve
white rule.
December 25
- 1907:
- Cabell Calloway III, better known as Cab Calloway, born in
Rochester, New
York
List of ACCESSKEYs Defined for This Document
An accesskey has been defined for each month in the year. In an attempt
at mnemonics, i have assigned numeric accesskeys to the first nine months of
the calendar (1 equals January through 9 equals September), then used the
first letter of the remaining months as the accesskeys for October through
December.
- 1 = January
- 2 = February
- 3 = March
- 4 = April
- 5 = May
- 6 = June
- 7 = July
- 8 = August
- 9 = September
- O = October
- N = November
- D = December
- L = List of accesskeys (this list)
- T = Terminal Index
Terminal Index
created April 2, 1999
last updated June 15, 2012