Tidbits of History

June 8 is Best Friends Day
Name Your Poison Day
National Jelly-Filled Doughnut Day

June 8, 632 – Muhammad, Islamic prophet, died in Medina and was succeeded by Abu Bakr who becomes the first caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate.

In 1789, James Madison introduced twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in the House of Representatives; by 1791, ten of them were ratified by the state legislatures and become the Bill of Rights; another was eventually ratified in 1992 to become the 27th Amendment.

June 8, 1794, Robespierre inaugurated the French Revolution’s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, with large organized festivals all across France. Though he was no admirer of Catholicism, he had a special dislike for atheism. He thought that belief in a supreme being was important for social order, and he liked to quote Voltaire: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”. With Robespierre’s death at the guillotine on July 28, 1794, the cult disappeared.

June 8,1845: Death of ‎Andrew Jackson , seventh President of the United States. He died at Nashville, Tennessee aged 78. On the last day of his presidency, Jackson admitted that he had but two regrets, that he “had been unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun.” His death was due to chronic tuberculosis, dropsy, and heart failure.

Birthday of Ida Saxton McKinley (1847), wife of ‎
William McKinley, first lady 1897-1901

In 1856, a group of 194 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty, arrived at Norfolk Island, commencing the Third Settlement of the Island.

June 8, 1887, Herman Hollerith applied for US patent #395,791 for the ‘Art of Applying Statistics’ – his punched card calculator.

On June 8, 1906, ‎President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value.

Birthday of Barbara Pierce Bush (1925), wife of ‎George H.W. Bush, mother of ‎George W. Bush, first lady 1989-1993. She died on Apr 17, 2018.

Milton Berle hosted the debut of Texaco Star Theater on June 8, 1948. It aired until 1956. Milton Berle became known as “Mr. Television”.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on June 8, 1949.

Birthday of Tim Berners-Lee (June 8, 1955), English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, (W3C) which oversees its continued development. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. While there, he proposed (1989) a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web, which permitted people to collaborate by sharing knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. On 6 Aug 1991, the first World Wide Web site was made available to the Internet at large, giving information on a browser and how to set up a Web server.

June 8, 2009, General Motors filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was the fourth largest United States bankruptcy in history.

June 6 is National Gardening Exercise Day
National Yo-Yo Day

June 6, 1586 – Francis Drake’s forces raid St. Augustine in Spanish Florida as part of Drake’s “Great Expedition”. Drake was the second to circumnavigate the globe. He was a hero to the English but a pirate to the Spaniards.

Birthday of Nathan Hale (June 6, 1755), American soldier of the American Revolution whose last words were: “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” He had been attempting to gather intelligence when he was captured by the British and executed.

On June 6, 1833, In Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland, President Andrew Jackson boarded a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad train for a pleasure trip to Baltimore. Jackson, who had never been on a train before, was the first president to take a ride on the “Iron Horse,” as locomotives were known then.

1844 – The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was founded in London in 1834.

The electric iron was invented in 1882 by Henry W. Seeley, a New York inventor. Seeley patented his “electric flatiron” on June 6, 1882. His iron weighed almost 15 pounds and took a long time to warm up. Other electric irons had also been invented, including one from France (1882), but it used a carbon arc to heat the iron.

June 6, 1932 – The Revenue Act of 1932 was enacted, creating the first gas tax in the United States, at a rate of 1 cent per US gallon.

In 1934 – New Deal: the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Securities Act of 1933 into law, establishing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

June 6, 1944 – World War II: the Battle of Normandy began. D-Day, code named Operation Overlord, commenced with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France. The allied soldiers quickly broke through the Atlantic Wall and pushed inland in the largest amphibious military operation in history.

June 6, 1968 – Robert F. Kennedy, Democratic Party senator from New York and brother of 35th President John F. Kennedy, died from gunshot wounds inflicted on June 5.

June 6, 1988 – Japanese-American internees (promise broken, May 1989)
President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”. The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs

June 5 is World Environment Day
National Running Day
National Gingerbread Day
National Ketchup / Catsup Day Both words are derived from the Chinese ke-tsiap, a pickled fish sauce. It made its way to Malaysia where it became kechap and ketjap in Indonesia. Catsup and katchup are acceptable spellings used interchangeably with ketchup, however, ketchup is the way it is popularly used today.

Anniversary of the baptism of Adam Smith, (June 5, 1723), Scottish economist and philosopher, author of “Wealth of Nations”

Great Lakes’ steamers – The Canadian-built Frontenac was launched on Sept 7, 1816. The Ontario was launched in the spring of 1817. The Ontario began active service first in April, 1817 and the Frontenac made its first trip on June 5th, 1817.

June 5, 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, started a ten-month (40-week) serial published in The National Era, an abolitionist periodical published in Washington, D.C.

Birthday of John Maynard Keynes (1883), English economist, financial expert and author.

Birthday of William Boyd (June 5, 1895), better known as Hopalong Cassidy. Boyd portrayed Hopalong Cassidy in 66 films and then on TV in the 1950s. His horse was named Topper.

Marshall Plan: In a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, the United States Secretary of State, George Marshall, called for economic aid to war-torn Europe.

Elvis Presley introduced his new single, “Hound Dog”, on The Milton Berle Show on June 5, 1956, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements.

2001 – Tropical Storm Allison made landfall on the upper-Texas coastline as a strong tropical storm and dumps large amounts of rain over Houston, Texas. The storm causes $5.5 billion in damages, making Allison the second costliest tropical storm in U.S. history.

2004 – Death of Ronald Wilson Reagan , fortieth President of the United States. He died in Bel Air, California at age 93 from pneumonia, complicated by Alzheimer’s disease.

June 3 is Repeat Day

According toNational Day Calendar.com

Observed on June 3rd, National Repeat Day could be an opportunity for some and a bad omen for others.

Repeating a foot massage or a day with a dear friend would make this holiday special.  Repeating a root canal or Hurricane Katrina are not suggested for this day.

It is also National Doughnut Day.  Doughnuts are a good explanation for National Repeat Day.

Another way to celebrate is by repeating some of the simple tasks of the day.  Wash the dishes twice.  Make the same meal for lunch as you do for supper.  Watch the same movie twice.  The 1993 film Groundhog Day comes to mind.  Send duplicate text messages.

Have a great day! Have a great day!

June 3 is also National Egg Day
and National Chocolate Macaroon Day

Chimborazo Day celebrates the highest point on Earth, the point closest to the Moon.   Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador, tops out at 20,702 feet, almost two miles lower than Everest. But that’s only compared to sea level. If we take the equatorial bulge into account—in other words, if we measure what peak is farthest from the center of the Earth—Chimborazo sticks more than 7,000 feet farther into space than any of the Himalayas do, since they’re located thousands of miles north of the Equator.

Shavuot, a Jewish holiday celebrating the day that God gave the Torah to the nation of Israel assembled at Mount Sinai.

On this day in 1539, Hernando de Soto claimed Florida for Spain.

Samuel de Champlain completed his third voyage to New France at Tadoussac, Quebec on June 3, 1608.

Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo founded in California by Father Junipero Serra on this day in 1770. Now called the Carmel Mission at Carmel-by-the-sea, California, near Monterey.

June 3, 1781, Jack Jouett began his midnight ride to warn Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia legislature of an impending raid by Banastre Tarleton.

June 3, 1800, U.S. President John Adams moved to Washington, DC. He was the first President to live in what later became the capital of the United States. John Adams’ blessing is engraved in the mantel in the State Dining Room of the White House. The benediction reads, “I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.” The words are taken from a letter written to Abigail Adams by Adams in 1800 and were engraved on the mantel in 1945 during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Birthday of Jefferson F. Davis (June 3, 1808), president of the Confederate States.

In 1851, the New York Knickerbockers became the first baseball team to wear uniforms which consisted of straw hats, white shirts and blue long trousers.

The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States was completed, running 14 miles (23 km) between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Oregon on June 3, 1889.

June 3, 1932 – Lou Gehrig and his teammate Tony Lazzeri hit four home runs in one game, and hit for the natural cycle, respectively. These two feats are both less common than a perfect game, which has occurred twenty-one times in one-hundred and twenty years.

June 3,1937: The Duke of Windsor married Wallis Simpson.  “Duke of Windsor” was a title in the United Kingdom. It was created on 8 March 1937, for Prince Edward, former King Edward VIII, following his abdication in December 1936.

1942 The Aleutian Islands Campaign was a military campaign conducted by the United States in the Aleutian Islands, part of the Alaska Territory…in World War II, starting on 3 June 1942. A small Japanese force occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska, but the remoteness of the islands and the difficulties of weather and terrain meant that it took nearly a year for a far larger U.S./Canadian force to eject them. The islands’ strategic value was their ability to control Pacific Great Circle routes. This control of the Pacific transportation routes is why U.S. General Billy Mitchell stated to the U.S. Congress in 1935, “I believe that in the future, whoever holds Alaska will hold the world. I think it is the most important strategic place in the world.” The Japanese reasoned that control of the Aleutians would prevent a possible U.S. attack across the Northern Pacific. Similarly, the U.S. feared that the islands would be used as bases from which to launch aerial assaults against the West Coast.

On June 3, 1965, Edward White became the first American astronaut to do a “space walk” when he left the Gemini 4 capsule.

June 2 is National Bubba Day National Bubba Day is celebrated across the United States each year on June 2nd. According to Wikipedia, “bubba” is a relationship nickname formed from brother and given to boys, especially eldest male siblings, to indicate their role in the  family.

National Rocky Road Day

I Love My Dentist Day

International Sex Workers’ Day (aka International Whore Day)

In the year 455, the Sack of Rome: Vandals entered Rome, and plundered the city for two weeks.

The first Récollet missionaries arrived at Quebec City, from Rouen, France in 1615. The Récollet are more commonly known as the Franciscans. The Recollect friars are said to have brewed the first beer in New France in 1620.

On June 2, 1692, Bridget Bishop was the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Found guilty, she was hanged on June 10.

Birthday of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington (June 2, 1731), First Lady 1789-1797, wife of George Washington.

June 2, 1774, Intolerable Acts: Amendment to original Quartering Act enacted, allowed governor in colonial America to house British soldiers in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings if suitable quarters not provided.

Birthday of Helen Herron Taft (June 2, 1861), wife of William Howard Taft; first lady from 1909-1913.

June 2, 1886 – The U.S. President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in the White House, becoming the only president to wed in the executive mansion.

Birthday of Edwin J. Shoemaker (June 2, 1907), American inventor and engineer who created the recliner chair and started the La-Z-Boy furniture company.

June 2, 1924 – The U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act (aka the Snyder Act) into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.

In 1928, Kraft’s Velveeta Cheese was invented. It was packaged using the 1921 invention of a tinfoil lining that could house the cheese inside a wooden box. Its special cooking properties quickly caught on. When melted, it was as smooth as velvet (hence its name), and it would never curdle when heated.

June 2, 1953 – The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, who was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Her Other Realms and Territories & Head of the Commonwealth, the first major international event to be televised. She wore three different crowns on this day – one on the way to Westminster Abbey, one to be crowned Queen, and one for the procession from the Abbey.

June 2, 1997 – In Denver, Colorado, Timothy McVeigh was convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was executed four years later.