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Day of the Dude: March 6, 1998 – Original release date of the Cohen Brothers film, The Big Lebowski, in which Jeff Bridges plays the title role
European Day of the Righteous: established on March 6, 2012 by the European Parliament to commemorate those who stood up against totalitarianism and crimes against humanity. March 6th is the anniversary of the death in 2007 of Moshe Bejski, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust with Oscar Schindler’s help, then went on to become an Israeli Supreme Court Justice and President of Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations Commission
Frozen Food Day: March 6, 1984 –first proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan
Oreo Cookie Day: March 6, 1912 - introduced by the National Biscuit Co., which later became Nabisco
Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day: March 6, 2002 – The Association of Women in Mathematics, founded in 1971, begins sponsoring Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day annually, and jointly sponsors the Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Ghana – Independence Day
Norfolk Island – Foundation Day
March 6th in History:
12 BC – Roman Emperor Augustus is named Pontifex Maximus (high priest of the College of Pontiffs, head of the state religion), adding it to the Emperor’s titles
Emperor Augustus as Pontifex Maximus
632 – Farewell Sermon (Khutbah/Khutbatul Wada) of Islamic Prophet Muhammad, in the Uranah valley of Mount Arafat, during the Islamic pilgrimage of Hajj
1475 – Michelangelo born, Italian sculptor, painter’ and architect
Michelangelo’s Pietà, in St Peter’s Basilica (1498–1499)
1521 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Guam
1619 – Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac born, French dramatist and satirist, noted for A Voyage to the Moon; the inspiration for Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac
1665 – The first joint Secretary of the Royal Society, German theologian and diplomat Henry Oldenburg, publishes the first issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
1745 – Casimir Pulaski born, Polish nobleman, revolutionary and military commander; organizer of the Pulaski Cavalry Legion for the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and reformer of the entire American cavalry; one of only eight people awarded honorary U.S. citizenship
1780 – Lucy Barnes born, American author; her letters, poems, and dissertations were collected and printed in a large pamphlet after her death, The Female Christian, believed to be the first defense written by a woman of Universalism (no eternal damnation, all souls will ultimately be reconciled to God). She suffered from infancy with asthma, and became an invalid as an adult, so she spent much of her time reading. She wrote the day before she died, at age 29: "Let us, therefore, be humble, and endeavor to pursue the paths of peace, and to walk in the straight and narrow way. And whenever we discover any going on in vice and wickedness, and walking in the broad road in search of happiness, let us pity their weakness and folly, and mistaken ideas of bliss, and endeavor, if possible, to restore them in the spirit of meekness, considering ourselves lest we also be tempted. For if we had their temptations, we might perhaps do equally as bad or even worse than they.”
1791 – Anna Claypoole Peale born, American painter, known for portrait miniatures and still life paintings
Anna Claypoole Peale
Self-Portrait, 1815
1806 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning born, English poet and writer; in frail health, she used her pen to campaign for the abolition of slavery and influence the reform of child labour laws. After the publication of her Poems in 1844 was much acclaimed, Robert Browning began a correspondence with her, which turned into a secret courtship and marriage. Her father disinherited her when he learned of their wedding. She and her husband moved to Italy in 1846, where she gave birth to their son in 1849. Her health continued to decline, and she died at age 55 of repiratory failure in Florence in 1861. Robert Browning published her last poems posthumously
1808 – At Harvard University, the first college orchestra is founded
1820 – The ‘Missouri Compromise’ was enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed by U.S. President James Monroe. The act admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state, but prohibited slavery in the rest of the northern Louisiana Purchase territory
1825 – Beethoven’s Opus 127: String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major premieres
Ludvig van Beethoven (1820)
by Joseph Karl Stieler
1836 – The thirteen-day siege of the Alamo by Santa Anna and his Mexican army of 3000 ends, when the small group of Texas volunteers are overrun by a massed Mexican attack
1853 – Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata opera debuts in Venice, Italy
1854 – The Pope’s Stone is stolen from the lapidarium of the Washington Monument
1857 – The U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous ruling, the Dred Scott decision that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported and sold as slaves” whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. The Court went further to declare that Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights when dealing with slaves in the territories, effectively rendering the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and making all territories open to slavery until they become states, and could, if they choose, enact state laws against it. Southerners celebrated this as a major victory, but Frederick Douglass predicted, “This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the whole slave system.” In August, 2017, in the dark and early hours of the morning, Maryland officials removed the statue of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney (1836-1864), who wrote the majority opinion in the case, from the grounds of the state capitol in Annapolis
Dred Scott - portrait by Louis Schultze
1882 – Sarah Wambaugh born, American political scientist, one of the world’s leading authorities on plebiscites, adviser to various commissions including the U.N. Plebiscite Commission to Jammu and Kashmir
1885 – Ring Lardner born, American writer and satirist
1886 – The Nightingale is launched, the first nursing magazine, edited by Dr. Sarah Post, a Bellevue nurse who had earned a medical degree. One critic declared that a magazine for nurses was “uncalled-for, improper and capable of doing harm.” Though it was only published for a few years, the journal maintained an “excellent standard of news and ethics” according to A History of Nursing, volume 3.
1893 – Ella Phillips Stewart born, one of the first African-American women pharmacists. She was the oldest child of sharecroppers in Virginia, who was sent at age six to live with her grandmother so she could go to school. She was top of her class, and won major scholarships to Storer Normal School for her secondary education, but left school to get married, and moved with her husband to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When their only child died at age three of whooping cough, they divorced. Stewart began working in a pharmacy as a bookkeeper, and became interested in becoming a pharmacist. In spite of the prejudice against African Americans and women, she was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy in 1914. In 1916, she became the first black woman to graduate from Pitt’s pharmacy program, and to pass the state examination. After working briefly as an assistant pharmacist, she opened her own drugstore at the General Hospital in Braddock, Pennsylvania. In 1918, she moved back to Pittsburgh and opened her pharmacy there. When she married William Stewart, another pharmacist, they worked in several cities before settling in Toledo, Ohio, and opening Stewarts’ Pharmacy in 1922. She became involved in African-American civic and service organizations, including the YWCA, the Enterprise Charity Club, the Ohio Association of Colored Women, and she was president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (1948-1952). In 1952, she was a delegate to the International Conference of Women of the World in Athens, Greece, and then became a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. government. In 1963, she was appointed to the U.S. commission of UNESCO. She died in Toledo at the age of 94 in 1987
1899 – Aspirin is patented by German researchers Felix Hoffman and Hermann Dreser
1910 – Ella Logan born in Scotland as Georgina Allen, Scottish-American Broadway singer and actress, who became a nightclub singer, often outside the U.S., because she was hounded from 1945 to 1961 by the FBI, who suspected her of having communist ties in spite of never finding any evidence to support the allegation. They placed her Los Angeles home under surveillance, monitored her activities and travels, and once searched her during a trip to New York, because of groundless suspicions that she was a “Russian courier agent.” Due to testimony by John J. Huber, an FBI undercover informant, before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1950, Logan was listed as a Communist sympathizer in the infamous Red Channels, an anti-communist document which stamped people in the entertainment industry as supposed Communists or Communist sympathizers from 1950 until its publication was ended in 1962 by a lawsuit. Among the prominent names it listed were Orson Welles, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Lena Horne, Edward R. Murrow, and Artie Shaw. Logan’s career was among thousands that were damaged or ended by being listed in the privately published pamphlet. Any organizations to which the accused had ever belonged which Red Channels deemed “subversive” – and it had a very long list of “suspicious” organizations – were published next to the name of the accused, and there was no procedure to clear one’s name once it was listed, even if the information was completely inaccurate. Logan died of cancer at age 59 in 1969
1924 – Sarah Caldwell born, American impresario, opera conductor and stage director
1927 – Gabriel García Márquez born, Colombian novelist, journalist and screenwriter; 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature; best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera
1928 – Chinese Civil War: a Communist attack on Peking (Beijing) results in 3,000 dead and 50,000 fled to Swatow (now spelled Shantou), which is on the coast, over 830 miles (1338 km) from Beijing
1937 – Valentina Tereshkova born, Russian cosmonaut, engineer, and General-major in the Soviet Air Force, and selected as a cosmonaut because of her expert skill in parachuting. She was the first woman to fly in space. piloting Vostok 6. Tereshkova was politically active after the collapse of the USSR, and is seen as a heroine in post-Soviet Russia
1939 – In Spain, Jose Miaja takes over the Madrid government after a military coup and vows to seek “peace with honor”
1939 – Charles Fuller born, African American playwright, co-founder of Philadelphia’s Afro-American Theatre; A Soldier’s Play won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
1941 – Dame Marilyn Strathern born, Welsh anthropologist, noted for work with natives of Papua New Guinea and in the UK on reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization, co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception; Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (1993-2008) and Mistress of Girton College (1998-2009)
1943 – Norman Rockwell publishes ‘Freedom from Want’ in The Saturday Evening Post with a matching essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the “Four Freedoms” series
‘Freedom from Want’
1944 – Mary Wilson born, American singer, one of the founding members of The Supremes; author of Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme and Supreme Faith: Someday We’ll Be Together
1944 – Dame Kiri Te Kanawa born, New Zealand lyric soprano and opera star; appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1982, and to the Order of New Zealand in 1995
Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess Almaviva in ‘The Marriage of Figaro’
1946 – Ho Chi Minh, President of Vietnam, strikes an agreement with France that recognizes his country as an autonomous state within the Indochinese Federation and the French Union
1947 – The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the contempt conviction of John L. Lewis, United Mine Workers of America president
1947 – Winston Churchill announces he opposes British troop withdrawals from India
1947 – Rayda Jacobs born, South African author and documentary filmmaker; noted for her novels, Eyes of the Sky, which won the 1996 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction, The Slave Book and Sachs Street. She also wrote the screenplay and co-directed Confessions of a Gambler, based on her novel of the same name
1947 – Jean Seaton born, English historian and academic; Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster; Official Historian of the BBC; noted for her volume of the official history of the BBC, Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation 1970-1987. Director of the Orwell Prize (for political writing, three prizes awarded annually)
1947 – The first air-conditioned naval ship, The Newport News, is launched from Newport News VA
1953 – Carolyn Porco born, American astronomer; planetary scientist known for work on the outer solar system, leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission to Saturn; expert on planetary rings and Saturn’s moon Enceladus; awarded the 2008 Isaac Asimov Science Award, the 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award for photographic work, and the 2010 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Communication of Science to the Public
1957 – The British African colonies of the Gold Coast and Togoland become the independent state of Ghana
1960 – In Switzerland, women finally gained the right to vote in municipal elections, but they could not vote in federal elections until 1971. Beginning in the late 1950s, Swiss women in some French-speaking cantons were able vote in local referendums. The first petition by Swiss women for political rights had been presented to the Federal Assembly in 1886
Swiss women lined up waiting to vote
1961 – Ruth Golembo born, South African financial journalist and managing director of Lange Public Relations (1995-2016); worked as investment columnist for the Business Times, the Financial Mail and the Sunday Times
1967 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announces his plan to establish a draft lottery
1973 – U.S. President Richard Nixon imposes price controls on oil and gas
1973 – John Lennon’s visa extension is canceled by the New York Office of the Immigration Department only 5 days after it was granted: the “official” reason was his marijuana conviction in 1968, but is really because of his involvement in left-wing politics while in America
1975 – Iran and Iraq announce that they have settled their border dispute
1980 –Islamic militants in Tehran say that they will turn over American hostages to the Revolutionary Council
1981 – Walter Cronkite appears on his last episode of “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” the end of 19 years on the job
Walter Cronkite - last day at CBS
1981 – Ronald Reagan announces a plan to cut 37,000 federal jobs
1985 – Yul Brynner’s 4,500th performance in The King and I
1990 – In Afghanistan, an attempted coup against President Najibullah fails
1990 – Russian Parliament passes a law sanctioning ownership of private property
1991 – In Paris, five men are jailed for plotting to smuggle Libyan arms to the Irish Republican Army
1992 – The computer virus “Michelangelo” goes into effect
1993 – Unita rebels capture Huambo, Angola’s 2nd-largest city, after a 2-month battle with Angolan government troops
1997 – A gunman steals Tete de Femme, a million-dollar Picasso portrait, from a London gallery; the painting is recovered a week later
1997 – Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II launches the first official Royal Web site
2005 – Tsotsi becomes the first South African film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film; also the first African film not made in French to win
2012 – 9,000 residents are evacuated from Wagga Wagga, Australia, as the Murrimbidgee River threatens to overflow
2014 – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pledged the support of the United Nations for a UK campaign to ban Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) during a meeting with Fahma Mohamed of Integrate UK. Early in 2014, Integrate UK had launched an online petition to end the practice, which quickly gained over 250,000 signatures. Malala Yousafzai also offered her support to the campaign
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with Fahma Mohamed / Malala Yousafzai
2015 – NASA spacecraft Dawn enters orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres after a 7 ½ year journey of 3,100 million miles (4,900 million km)
2016 – Honduran President Juan Hernández asks UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad Al-Hussein to assist in the investigation of the murder of Berta Cáceres on March 2, 2016. Cáceres was an environmental activist and indigenous leader, coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, for spearheading “a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam” at the Río Gualcarque in Western Honduras. The river is sacred to the Lenca people, the largest indigenous group in Honduras, who depend on it for their subsistence. By 2018, David Castillo Mejía, the executive president of the company which was to build the dam which Cáceres campaigned against, was the ninth person arrested for the murder, and the fourth with ties to the Honduran military. Castillo Mejía was accused by arresting authorities of providing logistical support and other resources to one of the hitmen already charged. He is the first person to be charged as being the “intellectual author” of Cáceres’s murder and the attempted murder of Mexican environmentalist Gustavo Castro. Before her murder, Berta Cáceres told close friends and family that Castillo Mejía hounded her with texts, phone calls, and appeared without warning at her home, work events and even the airport. Five years after Berta Cáceres was murdered by hired hitmen, the US-trained ex-military officer accused of masterminding the assassination was indicted on March 2, 2016 as the “intellectual author” of her murder. He was tried and found guilty in July, 2021
2019 – Former U.S. Senator Martha McSally (Republican/Arizona – 2019-2020) said a superior officer raped her during the time she served in the Air Force. She made the revelation during a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on sexual assault in the military. McSally, the first U.S. woman pilot to fly a combat mission and the first to command a fighter squadron, called for reforms in the ways the Pentagon handles such cases. "Like you, I am also a military sexual assault survivor," McSally said, addressing people who had been assaulted. "But unlike so many brave survivors, I didn't report being sexually assaulted. Like so many women and men, I didn't trust the system at the time. I blamed myself. I was ashamed and confused … I thought I was strong but felt powerless."
2020 – After extensive research, Oxford University Press has quietly begun replacing hundreds of sentences used in Oxford dictionaries as examples of how to use the word which are now deemed to be sexist. Sample sentences, which are extracted from published texts, previously used for “anatomy” have been “He left dusty handprints on his lady customers’ anatomies,” and “She was unable to reach for the bag in case she revealed more of her anatomy than she already had.” These examples have been replaced by “People should never be reduced to their anatomies.” The extensive changes were prompted by a complaint in 2016 from Michael Oman-Reagan, a Canadian anthropologist, about these examples: “rabid” (“rabid feminist”), “shrill” (“the rising shrill of women’s voices”) and “nagging” (“a nagging wife”). “People were talking about stereotypes being perpetuated by example sentences. That was something we’d never considered before,” said Katherine Connor Martin, head of language content and data at OUP. “We’ve done a really extensive project looking at every example sentence that had a female pronoun in it, involving thousands and thousands of examples, looking for patterns to check if this was a valid critique.” Martin cited “Housework,” which had been illustrated with the sentence “She was doing the housework.” Martin said lexicographers struggled to find examples drawn from actual texts that were not sexist stereotypes: “it was unreal, all the examples were either ‘she was doing the housework’ or ‘he wasn’t doing the housework’, that’s so tied into the notion of housework.” They finally settled on “I was busy doing housework when the doorbell rang.”
Michael Oman-Reagan - Katherine Connor Martin
2021 – The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a UN partner, announced that the proportion of women parliamentarians worldwide reached 25.5% in 2020 – a historic first but still far from gender parity. IPU Secretary-General Martin Chungong said, “While we celebrate and welcome this all-time high, we feel that progress is painstakingly, or even excruciatingly, slow. At the current rate, it will take another 50 years before we can achieve gender parity in parliament. And of course, we all agree that this is not tenable, it’s not acceptable.”
Everybody have a Free Thinking Friday
