Fariseos, Mexico
Mayan Indians, Mexico: Every Friday during Lent, the Fariseos, Lenten Clown Police, burlesque the solemn religious processions with ludicrous pantomime, making fun of every element of the ceremonies.
Source: The Daily Bleed

Liberation Day, Kuwait (1991)

1802 Victor Hugo (d. May 22, 1885), French writer, perhaps the most important of the Romantic authors in the French language
 

'To make the people happy, lash them with guns'

By Victor Hugo

To make the people happy, lash them with guns.
The great words are empty, the high-sounding ones,
Fraternity, Justice, the Mission of France,
Liberty, Progress, Human Rights. Tolerance;
Socrates was mad. read Lilut and learn;
Christ, demagogue with a socialist turn,
Is much over-rated; the cannon is God,
Paixhans is its prophet; Earth, throw up your sod!
Man's ultimate aim is to learn how to kill.
The sword is the way to keep the people still.
Man's greatest achievement: the bullet. His star,
The light of a Lancaster bomb from afar.
His highest admirations under the sun,
The Armstrong mortar and the Cavalli gun.
God was mistaken: Caesar transcends:
In the beginning the Word; with Caesar it ends.
To think is sedition; to speak – worst of all!
The voice is for silence, the mind is – to crawl;
The world's on its belly, and man's greatness of yore,
Turns flabby and trembles; and – Peace! says War.

Translated from the French by Scott Bates; written a few years before the Franco-Prussian War when the poet was in exile for having opposed the dictatorial regime of Napoleon III, Lilut was an apologist for the Napoleonic regime, Paixhans the inventor of a kind of cannon.

1829 Levi Strauss (d. 1902), clothing designer

1841 Evelyn Baring, 1^st Earl of Cromer, British controller in Egypt during 1879 and later agent and consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907

The Flammarion Woodcut is an enigmatic woodcut by an unknown artist. It is referred to by this name because its first documented appearance is in page 163 of Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (Paris, 1888).

1842 Camille Flammarion (d. June 3, 1925), French astronomer and prolific author

1846 Buffalo Bill (William Cody; d. 1917), American wild west showman

"One of the most colorful figures of the Old West became the best known spokesman for the New West. He was born William Frederick Cody in Iowa in 1846. At 22, in Kansas, he was rechristened 'Buffalo Bill'. He had been a trapper, a bullwhacker, a Colorado 'Fifty-Niner', Pony Express rider (1860), wagonmaster, stagecoach driver, Civil War soldier, and even hotel manager. He earned his nickname for his skill while supplying Kansas Pacific Railroad workers with buffalo meat. He was about to embark on a career as one of the most illustrious prairie scouts of the Indian Wars."   Source

"In later years Buffalo Bill's Wild West would star the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and Buck Taylor, and for one season, and slayer of General Custer, Chief Sitting Bull. Cody even added an international flavor by assembling 'Rough Riders of the World' that included cossacks, lancers and other Old World cavalrymen along with the vaqueros, cowboys and Indians of the American West …

"Cody made a fortune from his show business success and lost it to mismanagement and a weakness for dubious investment schemes. In the end, even the Wild West show itself was lost to creditors. Cody died on January 10, 1917, and is buried in a tomb blasted from solid rock at the summit of Lookout Mountain near Denver, Colorado."   Source

Buffalo Bill Historical Center - Homepage  

1852 John Harvey Kellogg (d. December 14, 1943), American medical doctor in Battle Creek, Michigan who ran a sanitarium using holistic methods, with a particular focus on nutrition, enemas and exercise. These days, Kellogg, who was a radical advocate of vegetarianism, is best known for the invention of the corn flake.

With his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, he started the Sanitas Food Company to produce their whole grain cereals around 1897. A standard breakfast then was eggs and meat eaten by the well off. The poor ate porridge, farina, gruel, and other boiled grains. John and Will eventually argued over the addition of sugar to the cereals (which Will wanted to do) and in 1906 Will started his own company called the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which eventually became the Kellogg Company.

Source: Wikipedia

"The San, like its director, offered up a strange mix of solid medical thinking and superstitious quackery. Dr. Kellogg was a fervent Seventh-Day Adventist (although he and the church would eventually part ways over his increasing insistence upon running all of the church's medical facilities, and over the 'strange doctrines' which he had begum [sic] to teach). He embraced his religion's approach to healthy living …"   Source

Plain Facts for Old and Young, by JH Kellogg, e-text    NY Times obituary

1854 Sir Mungo MacCallum (d. September 3, 1942), Scottish-born Australian academic and university administrator, teacher of John Le Gay Brereton at Sydney University, where MacCallum was a member of the senate from 1898, and dean of the faculty of arts from the same year to 1920. He was the university's vice-chancellor 1924 - 27, deputy-chancellor 1928 - 34, and chancellor 1934 - 36. He was also "first president of the Shakespeare Society of NSW, a trustee of the Public Library from 1890 to 1912 (Chairman for the years 1906 - 12), a member of the Advisory Committee of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, 1917-29, and Chairman of Trustees of Sydney Grammar School, 1929 - 32. He helped found, and became first president of the Sydney Branch of the Australian English Association in 1923. MacCallum was awarded an LL.D by the University of Glasgow, and an honorary D.Litt by Oxford University in 1925, for his Shakespearian studies. In 1926 he was appointed KCMG."   (Source)

"He was a great influence in the rapidly-growing university of his time, and his eloquence, scholarship and wisdom left a lasting impression on it. His portrait by Longstaff (q.v.) is in the Great Hall of the university of Sydney."   Source

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

1857 Emile Coué (d. July 2, 1926), French psychologist and pharmacist who introduced a method of psychotherapy, healing, and self-improvement, based on autosuggestion or self-hypnosis. The Coué method relied in part on routine repetition of the formula made even more famous in later years by John Lennon (in 'Beautiful Boy'): "Every day in every way, I am becoming better and better." ("Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux.")

1861 King Ferdinand of Bulgaria (d. 1948)

1893 IA Richards (d. 1979), literary critic and rhetorician

1887 William Frawley, American actor (Miracle on 34^th Street; I Love Lucy; My Three Sons)

1896 Ida Eva Noddack Tacke, unsung pioneer nuclear scientist

"Ida Eva Tacke was born in 1896 in the village of Lackhausen, Germany.  She studied chemistry at Technische Hochschule in Berlin.  She received her diploma in 1919, and her doctorate in 1921. In her first assignment of her professional career she, with her future husband Walter Noddack; and along with Otto Berg (the X-ray technician), discovered rhenium. The discovery of rhenium was incredible; it was one of the last naturally occurring elements to be discovered. Mendelev developed the periodic table in 1869.  He left gaps in his Table for future scientists to discover the missing elements; he also predicted the properties of these elements based on their position in the Periodic Table. Because element 75 (Rhenium) and 43 (Technetium) were the last two members of Group VII, their properties could not be predicted. Ida and Walter Noddack researched the possible properties of those elements, which eventually led to the discovery of Rhenium. Ida Noddack-Tacke was also the first person to mention the possibility of uranium fission.  Because of the fact that she was a woman scientist her idea was scoffed at by Otto Hahn. It wasn't till five years later that it was proved that Ida Noddack's theory was correct. Otto Hann did not cite her paper on uranium fission. In 1960 Walter Noddack died, and in 1968 Ida retired. She lived in Bad Neuenahr near Bonn on the Rhine until 1978 when she died."   Source

More  

Comix, comics and cartoons in the Book of Days

1909 King Talal (d. 1972), King of Jordan

1910 Dr Paul White (d. December 21, 1992), Australian Christian missionary and author known as 'the Jungle Doctor'

1913 George Barker (d. 1991), British poet

1916 Jackie Gleason (d. 1987), actor, writer, composer, comedian (The Honeymooners)

1918 Theodore Sturgeon (d. 1985), science fiction writer

1920 Tony Randall (d. 2004), actor (The Odd Couple)

1928 Antoine 'Fats' Domino, US jazz musician and singer

1928 John Ewart, Australian radio and TV actor

1932 Johnny Cash (d. September 12, 2003), US actor and country music singer

1933 Godfrey Cambridge, American actor (d. 1976) who died of heart attack on the set of the 1976 TV movie Victory at Entebbe, where he was set to play Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (1928 - 2003). Amin claimed Cambridge's death was "punishment from God".

1941 Tony Ray-Jones (d. 1972), British photographer

1947 Sandie Shaw, British singer, Eurovision Song Contest winner

1950 Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand

1954 Michael Bolton, singer

1956 Keisuke Kuwata, Japanese singer

1962 Greg Germann, actor

1971 Erykah Badu, singer

1984 Natalia Lafourcade, Mexican pop singer

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747 BCE Epoch (origin) of Ptolemy's Nabonassar Era.

 

1256 King Henry III of England commanded the Sheriff of London to have built "at our Tower of London one house of forty feet long, and twenty feet deep, for our Elephant". Henry's elephant, a gift from King Louis IX of France, was drawn from life by the historian Matthew Paris for his Chronica Majora, and the first elephant to be seen in England since Claudius's war elephants during the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 CE.

During Henry's reign, the Tower became the home of an unusual collection of animals that ultimately evolved into the Tower Menagerie, which continued until the 19^th Century (this was where William Blake saw the tiger that inspired his famous poem).

England underwent a massive face-lift during the course of the thirteenth century and other great building projects were also undertaken, such as the reconstruction of Westminster Abbey (ordered by Henry in 1245), Lincoln Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral, Merton College, Oxford and York Minster.

Henry's elephant is carved in Exeter Cathedral and might be the inspiration for the heraldic device 'Elephant and Castle', the arms of the Cutlers' Company of London. Its heraldry survived in an 18^th-Century pub sign that in turn gave its name to a district in South London.

Henry's jumbo is supposed to have died in 1257 from drinking too much red wine. It could not have been a jumbo, as a matter of fact, because the term (still commonly used, in Australia at least, for elephants in general) did not come about until 1865, more than six centuries after Lou's gift to Hank. As Wikipedia tells us:

Jumbo (1861 - September 15, 1885) was the most famous elephant ever, and is the root of the adjective 'jumbo'.

Jumbo was an African elephant, born in 1861 in the French Sudan from where he was imported to France and kept in the old Zoo Jardin des Plantes close to the South railway station Gare de Sud in Paris . In 1865 he was transferred to the London Zoo, where he became famous through the riding operations. It was the London zoo-keepers that gave Jumbo its name. It is a slightly garbled version of the word jambo, which is Swahili for "hello".

He was sold in 1882 to P. T. Barnum, owner of "The Greatest Show on Earth", the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Barnum's publicity made the name Jumbo synonymous with "huge".

Estimated to be 3.25 meters high in the London Zoo, it was claimed that Jumbo was approximately 4 meters tall by the time of his death.

Jumbo died at a railway station in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, where a locomotive crushed him. A statue there now commemorates that event.

Jumbo's skeleton was donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Jumbo's hide was stuffed and traveled with Barnum's circus for a number of years. In 1889, Barnum donated the stuffed Jumbo to Tufts University, where it was displayed until destroyed by a fire in 1975. In honor of Barnum's donation, Jumbo became the Tufts mascot.

History of elephants in Europe    The Tower of London - History

Daniel Hahn,  The Tower Menagerie

 

1266 Battle of Benevento: French forces, under Charles of Anjou, overcame a combined German-Sicilian force.