Today in History

[Tamrin]

Tuesday, 8 November
Craft: Feast day of Quatuor Coronati, the Four Crowned Martyrs

1656 - Birth of Sir Edmond Halley, 1st to calculate comet's orbit (Halley's Comet)

1674 - Death of John Milton, English poet (Paradise Lost)

1847 - Birth of Bro. Bram Stoker, Irish novelist (Dracula)

1897 - Birth of Dorothy Day, US activist and author (Stump the Authors)

1900 - Birth of Margaret Mitchell, American author (Gone With the Wind)

1907 - In Australia, Judge HB Higgins introduced the world's first basic wage concept

1978 - Death of Norman Rockwell, US artist

Christiaan Barnard
South African surgeon (performed 1st heart transplant)

It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms

[Tamrin]

Wednesday, 9 November
Germany, Austria, Switzerland: Inventor's Day

1731 - Birth of Benjamin Banneker, African-American astronomer, mathematician and surveyor

1818 - Birth of Ivan Turgenev, Russia, novelist, poet and playwright (Fathers & Sons)

1841 - Birth of M.W. Bro. Edward VII, King of England (1901-10)

1877 - Birth of Allama Iqbal, Indian philosopher-poet

1928 - Birth of Anne Sexton, American poet (Live or Die)

1934 - Birth of Prof. Carl Sagan, US astronomer and author (Cosmos, Broca's Brain)

1938 - "Kristallnacht" (Crystal Night), Nazi stormtroopers attacked Jews

Jean Monnet
French-European, internationalist
(Born this day 1889)

Nothing is possible without men; nothing is lasting without institutions

[Tamrin]

Thursday, 10 November
Revolutionary France: Feast day of Reason*
International Day of Rational Thought (a day for celebrating healthy skepticism, reasoned thinking and the human capacity for rationality, and criticism of superstitions and irrational beliefs)

1483 - Birth of Martin Luther, Eisleben, Germany, founded Protestantism

1728 - Birth of Oliver Goldsmith, Irish born British playwright

1759 - Birth of Friedrich von Schiller, Germany, poet/lyricist (Ode to Joy)

1879 - Birth of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, American poet

1893 - Birth of John P Marquand, American writer

1938 - Death of Kemal Atatürk, 1st President of Turkey

1960 - Birth of Neil Gaiman, English fantasy and science fiction writer (Stardust)

*In Women of the French Revolution (pp.128/9), Linda Kelly tells us of this day, the Feast Day of Reason, in France following the revolution:

At the same time that women on grounds of morals or expediency, were being forced back into private life, a chosen few were offered a symbolic public role. As goddesses of Reason, in the newly instituted state religion of that name, they presided over festivals all over France. The Jacobin government, while denying women the right of political expression, had no objection to placing them on an official pedestal…
Notre Dame was taken over as a Temple of Reason, and a festival to inaugurate the new cult was planned for 20 Brumaire (November 10). The Temple required its tutelary deity, a living figure — since a statue might recall the Virgin Mary — who could be changed from festival to festival. The chosen goddesses, it was decreed, were to be chosen among persons "whose character renders beauty respectable and whose severity of morals and manners repulses license". It was an ideal not always realised; festivals of Reason, more often than not, degenerated into saturnalia.

The opening festival took place as planned in Notre Dame. The cathedral had been stripped of its religious ornaments, and a Temple of Philosophy erected in the aisle. The goddess of Reason, a well known actress, Mademoiselle Maillard, dressed in white with a long blue cloak and scarlet cap of liberty, was carried in procession to the Temple and enthroned to the strains of the "Ça ira" and "Marseillaise". "Chaste ceremony, sad, dry and boring," commented Michelet in his Femmes de la Révolution.

[Tamrin]

Friday, 11 November 2011 (11/11/11)
Armistice Day (1918, WWI ends at 11 am on Western Front)

1744 - Birth of Abigail Adams, (wife of US President John Adams & mother of Pres. John Quincy Adams)

1821 - Birth of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian author (Crime and Punishment)

1855 - Death of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher

1880 - Death of Lucretia Mott, American feminist, abolitionist

1885 - Birth of Bro. George S. Patton, American General

1922 - Birth of Kurt Vonnegut, Jnr., American author (Slaughterhouse Five)

1975 - Australian Dismissal: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam removed by crown

Ned Kelly, Australian bush ranger
(Hanged this day 1880)

Such is Life(last words)

[Tamrin]

Saturday, 12 November 2011
World: Elizabeth Cady Stanton Day (1815)

0764 - Tibetan troops occupied Chang'an, the capital of the Chinese Tang Dynasty, for fifteen days.

1035 - Death of Canute "The Great", King of the Danes (1016-1035)

1815 - Birth of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, American social activist, abolitionist and feminist

1817 - Birth of Bahá'u'lláh (Mirza Husayn Ali), Persian mystic, founded Bahá'ís faith

1840 - Birth of Auguste Rodin, France, sculptor (Kiss, Thinker)

1865 - Death of Elizabeth Gaskell, English novelist

1990 - Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for the World Wide Web

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sor_Juana_In%C3%A9s_de_la_Cruz
]Juana Ines de La Cruz

[/url]
Mexican poet, nun and feminist (Primer Sueno)
(Born this day 1651)

I believed, when I entered this convent, I was escaping
from myself, but alas, poor me, I brought myself with me![/center]

[Tamrin]

Sunday, 13 November 2011
Ancient Egypt: Lamentations of Isis

0354 - Birth of St Augustine of Hippo, Numidia, Algeria, former Manichean, Christian Father

1460 - Death of Henry the Navigator, prince of Portugal, [G.M. of Knights of Christ (succeeded K.T.)]

1714 - Birth of William Shenstone, English poet

1850 - Birth of Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish author (Treasure Island)

1869 - Birth of Helene Stöcker, German feminist, pacifist and publicist

1955 - Birth of Whoopi Goldberg, American actor

1974 - Suspicious death of Karen Gay Silkwood, American nuclear plant worker and whistle-blower

James C. Maxwell
Scottish physicist (Treatise on Electricity)
(Born this day 1831)

At quite uncertain times and places, the atoms left their heavenly path,
and by fortuitous embraces, engendered all that being hath. and though
they seem to cling together, and form 'associations' here, yet, soon or
late, they burst their tether, and through the depths of space career

(would that all scientific dissertations were written thus)

[Tamrin]

Monday, 14 November 2011
World Diabetes Day

1716 - Death of Gottfried W. Leibniz, German philosopher, scientist and mathematician

1797 - Birth of Sir Charles Lyell, FRS, Scottish geologist (Principles of Geology)

1831 - Death of Georg W.F. Hegel, German philosopher (Dialectics)

1889 - Birth of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st Indian PM (1947-64)

1915 - Death of Bro. Booker T Washington, US educator and organizer

1916 - Death of Saki (HH Munro), British writer

1990 - Death of Malcolm Muggeridge, UK author, WW II spy for Britain

Charles, Prince of Wales, OGG
(Born this day 1948)

I think it's something that dawns on you with the most ghastly, inexorable sense.
I didn't suddenly wake up in my pram one day and say 'Yippee, I —', you know.
But I think it just dawns on you, you know, slowly, that people are interested in
one, and slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility

(Asked when he had first realised that he was heir to the throne,
in a Radio interview with Jack di Manio broadcast on 1 March 1969)

[Tamrin]

Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Ancient Rome: Feast Day of Feronia — "Slaves believed she was a goddess of freedom… in the temple at Terracina, the slaves who had just been freed would go there and receive the pileus (a hat that symbolized their liberty), which they would wear on their shaved heads."

1280 - Death of St Albertus Magnus, German philosopher and Doctor of the Church

1630 - Death of Johann Kepler German astronomer

1731 - Birth of William Cowper, English poet and hymnist

1741 - Birth of Johann Kaspar Lavater, Swiss poet and philosopher

1881 - Birth of Franklin P Adams, American columnist (Information Please)

1887 - Birth of Marianne Moore, American poet

1978 - Death of Margaret Mead, American anthropologist

William Herschel, German-born astronomer
(Born this day 1738)

And it is doubtless our paramount duty, in every state of society, to
alleviate the pressure of the purely evil part of this distribution, as much
as possible, and, by all the means we can devise, secure the lower links
in the chain of society from dragging in dishonor and wretchedness

[Tamrin]

Wednesday, 16 November 2011
International Day of Tolerance

1717 - Birth of Bro. Jean le Rond d'Alembert, French mathematician, physicist, philosopher

1836 - Initiation of Bro. David Kalakaue, King of Hawaii, Lodge Le Progree de L’Oceanie No. 124

1873 - Birth of Bro. William C. Handy 33°, (“Father of the Blues”) US composer and musician

1896 - Bro. Sir George Reid, Australian P.M. (1904/5), made a Mason in Lodge Centennial, NSW

1930 - Birth of Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer (Christmas in Biafra)

1935 - Birth of Elizabeth Drew, US political journalist (Politics & Money: The Road to Corruption)

1946 - Birth of Terence McKenna, Irish-American theoretician of consciousness

John Bright
British Radical and Liberal statesman
(Born this day 1811)

If this phrase of the ''balance of power'' is to be always an argument for war,
the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure

[Tamrin]

Thursday, 17 November 2011
International: Students’ Day

0003 - BCE - According to Clement of Alexandria, Jesus Christ was born on this date

1494 - Death of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Italian philosopher (Oration on the Dignity of Man)

1624 - Death of Jakob Böhme, German Lutheran mystic and philosopher

1858 - Death of Robert Owen, Scottish socialist planner (New Lanark)

1866 - Birth of Voltairine de Cleyre, US anarchist

1875 - The Theosophical Society founded by Blavatsky, Olcott and others

1937 - Birth of Peter Cook, English comedian and publisher (Private Eye magazine)

Sheilah Graham
English-born US gossip columnist
(Died this day 1988)

You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough.
You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts
through the skin and joins the energy that created the world