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Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Dr Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary went on sale for the first time on June 14, 1755

The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.
Dr Samuel Johnson

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
Dr Samuel Johnson

I am a little bit of a woman, somewhat more than 40, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff never very much to look at in my best of days, and looking like a used-up article now.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, American novelist, born on June 14, 1811

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and the time the tide will turn.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.
Harriet Beecher Stowe; (attrib.) of her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin

In Japan, Orochi is slain today

Highly recommended:
Folklore of World Holidays
by Margaret Read MacDonald

The Encyclopedia of Eastern Mythology

Myths and Legends of Japan

Asian Mythology

Myths and Legends of Japan

The Masks of God
Joseph Campbell

Nordic Gods and Heroes

Favorite Norse Myths

The Rule of Four

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia

Worse Than Watergate
John Dean

8 Weeks to Optimum Health

Women's Activism and Globalization

8 Minutes in the Morning

Stand and Deliver
Hip Hop activism

Salam Pax
The Baghdad Blogger

To support this project
Search by keywords for books, music, computers, software, home and family products and much more.

What Would Jefferson Do?
By Thom Hartmann

When Corporations Rule the World

Outfoxed - Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

The Corporation
Highly recommended DVD

Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
By Bruce Shapiro

The Skeptic's Dictionary

Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
By Bruce Shapiro

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror

D'aulaire's Book of Greek Myths

Word Origins

Seeds of Deception

Gaian Democracies

Environmental Activism

Gaia's Garden

Permaculture

Introduction to Permaculture

Permaculture Two

The Book of Saints

The Da Vinci Code

Daily Everything

Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths

More women's suffrage books

The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom

Celtic Folklore Cooking

Globalization/Anti-Globalization

Live with Passion!
Anthony Robbins


More books, calendars, T-shirts, mugs, music, posters, etc at  
Cafe Diem!

Celtic Daily Prayer

Dude, Where's My Country?

Photo of the day

Mother Earth Spirituality

Wheel of the Year

Listowner: Click for by far the best free service I have found that really increases my ezine subscriptions. It will work for your e-groups too.
Pip Wilson

The Merry Pranksters
Ken Kesey

On the Bus

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Spit in the Ocean

Kesey's Jail Journal

The First Third & Other Writings
Neal Cassady

Women of the Beat Generation

Second day: Day of Meditation on the Salvation of all Beings.

Festival of Vestalia, in honour of Vesta, goddess of fire and hearth, Roman Empire (Jun 7 - 15)

Feast day of Vidar, son of Odin (modern Asatru)
Viking tradition says all leather workers should put aside all of their offcuts for Vidar's boots, so he can beat the demonic wolf, Fenris.

"In Norse myth, Vidar is the son of Odin and the giantess Grid (Gridr). He is the god of silence and revenge, the second strongest of the gods. At the destruction of the world, Odin will be killed by the wolf Fenrir, and Vidar will avenge his father by killing the wolf with his bare hands. He will press one foot on Fenrir's bottom jaw, and will take hold of his other jaw and tear the wolf apart. He is one of the gods that will rule the new world when it is created. His hall in Asgard is Vidi."   Source

Encyclopedia of Norse Mythology

 

Sumiyoshi O-taue Shinji, (Sumiyoshi) Rice-planting Ceremony, Sumiyoshi Taisha Shrine, Osaka, Japan
A custom dating back more than 1,700 years.

"Transplanting rice shoots from the seedbed to the rice paddy field is called 'Taue'. To pray for a bountiful harvest of rice, a group of women clad in a traditional farmer's costume plant rice seedlings in a rice paddy, singing rice-planting songs to the accompaniment of drums and flutes, usually played by men clad inYukata."   Source

Izawanomiya Otaue Matsuri, Izawanomiya Shrine, Mie Prefecture, Japan
"Rice-planting festival at a sacred rice field within the precincts of the grand shrine at Ise. After the rice-planting itself, the Taketori-shinji ritual is performed by a group of loincloth-wearing men who battle in the muddy paddy field for charms attached to a 14m high bamboo pole."   Source

Flag Day, United States  
The Stars and Stripes originated as a result of a resolution adopted by the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia on June 14, 1777. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation calling for a nationwide observance of Flag Day on June 14, the birthday of the Stars and Stripes. It was not until 1949 that Congress made this day a permanent observance.
Source    Federal Flag Code    US Flag Code    

In the Almanac:
Betsy Ross    Star Spangled Banner   Francis Scott Key    World's best flag & national anthem

Mothers' Day, Afghanistan

Starting Mid-June Dramatic festival, Epidaurus, Greece
An annual event lasting throughout July and the first fortnight of August, in the ancient sanctuary of Asclepius (Aesculapius; Asklepios; Asklepius), the god of medicine. An open-air amphitheatre, the best in Greece, designed by Polycleitos the Younger, accommodates 14,000 spectators. The acoustics here are believed by some to be the best in the world. This modern festival began in 1954.

June marriages lucky

"'Good to the man and happy to the maid.' This is an old Roman superstition. The festival of Juno Moneta was held on the Calends of June, and Juno was the great guardian of women from birth to death."
Ivor H Evans, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Cassell, London, 1988

Runic half-month of Dag commences

Feast day of St Basil the Great, Archbishop of Caesaria, confessor
(Sweet basil, Oscimum basilicum, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Basil (c. 330 - January 1, 379), also called Basil the Great, was bishop of Caesarea, a leading churchman in the 4^th century. The Eastern Orthodox Church considers him a saint and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, together with Gregory Nazianzus and John Chrysostom. That church commemorates him on January 1. Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, and Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa are called the Cappadocian Fathers. The Roman Catholic Church considers him a saint and a Doctor of the Church.

In Greek tradition, his name was given to Father Christmas and is supposed to visit children and give presents every January 1 (his main feast day in the Western Church), unlike other traditions where this person is St Nicholas and comes every Christmas.

Read more Eastern Orthodox St Basil Day traditions

Feast day of St Castora Gabrielli

Feast day of St Docmael (Dogmael; Toël), confessor

Feast day of St Gerold

Feast day of St Hartwig

Feast day of St Joseph the Hymnographer

Feast day of St Lotharius

Feast day of St Marcian of Syracuse

Feast day of St Mark of Lucera

Feast day of St Methodius, confessor, Patriarch of Constantinople

Feast day of St Nennus, or Nehemias, abbot

Feast day of St Psalmodius, hermit

Feast day of Ss Rufinus and Valerius, martyrs

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

During Corpus Christi week, the Patum, Berga, province of Barcelona, Catalonia

From Wikipedia: The Patum de Berga is celebrated each year, in the solemnity of Corpus Christi. Those who visit Berga on Thursday and on Sunday of Corpus Christi or on Wednesday and on Saturday evening, could easily feel the festive atmosphere of 'La Patum'. The fire, the smoke and everyone jumping up and down, dancing and drinking will enable you to participate in a celebration which, after a number of changes originates in the popular and religious theatre of the Middle Ages.

"The Patum of Berga is a popular festival whose origin is to be found in the celebrations and parades accompanying the Corpus Christi processions of the Middle Ages. It takes the form of a series of theatrical performances and parade of a variety of effigies through the streets of this Catalan community north of Barcelona. 

"The Patum takes place every year during the week of Corpus Christi, between the end of May and the end of June, and comprises several parts: an extraordinary meeting of the municipal council, the appearance of the Tabal (a large and emblematic festival drum presiding over the festivities) and the Quatre Fuets announcing the festivities. The following days see numerous celebrations, the most important of which are the parades, the ceremonial Patum, the children's Patum and the full Patum. The Taba (tambourine), the Turks, Cavallets (papier mâché horses), Maces (demons wielding maces and whips), Guites (mule dragons), the eagle, giant-headed dwarves, Plens (fire demons) and giants dressed as Saracens are all allegorical figures and representations that parade one after the other through the streets, performing different acrobatic tricks and spreading light and music among the joyous audience. All the figures join to perform the final dance, the Tirabol."   Source

 

Liberation Day, Falkland Islands

Flag Day, United States

Mother's Day, Afghanistan

World Blood Donor Day
Celebration of blood donation on the birth date of Karl Landsteiner, who discovered ABO blood groups.

International Weblogger's Day
Celebration of the work of webloggers around the world.

Birthday of the US Army, United States

On which day of the week were you born? Find out here

1671 Tomaso Albinoni, composer (d. 1751)

1736 Charles Augustin de Coulomb, mathematician, grandfather of soil mechanics (d. 1806)

1794 John Gibson Lockhart, lawyer, novelist and critic, born at Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire; he married Sir Walter Scott's daughter, and wrote his father-in-law's biography

1811 Harriet Beecher Stowe (d. July 1, 1896), American abolitionist and novelist (Uncle Tom's Cabin). She was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, an abolitionist Congregationalist preacher from Boston, and the elder sister of renowned clergyman and reformer, Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - '77). She journeyed to Europe, becoming friends with George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Lady Byron. British public opinion turned against her when her charges against Lord Byron's love affairs became public.

Early progressives in the Book of Days    Faces for Famous Women    

Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled From Her Letters and Journals by Her Son Charles Edward Stowe, available freely at Project Gutenberg

Harriet Beecher Stowe's brief biography and works

Biography at FemBio – Notable Women International

History's Women: Harriet Beecher Stowe    More    More    And more

1820 John Bartlett (d. December 3, 1905), American writer and publisher, compiler of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

1832 Nikolaus Otto, engineer (d. 1891)

1855 Robert M La Follette ('Fighting Bob' La Follette; d. June 18, 1925), American politician who pursued public policies to improve the lot of farmers, workers, children and women

"LaFollette, Robert Marion (1855-1925) -- also known as Robert M. LaFollette; 'Fighting Bob' -- Father of Robert Marion LaFollette, Jr. and Philip Fox LaFollette; grandfather of Bronson Cutting LaFollette. Born in Primrose, Dane County, Wis., June 14, 1855. U.S. Representative from Wisconsin 3rd District, 1885-91; Governor of Wisconsin, 1901-06; U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, 1906-25; died in office 1925; candidate for Republican nomination for President, 1908, 1916; Progressive candidate for President of the United States, 1924. Died of heart disease complicated by asthma and pneumonia, in Washington, D.C., June 18, 1925. Interment at Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wis. See also: congressional biography."

Source

1857 Adolphus George Taylor (AG Taylor; nicknamed 'Giraffe', 'Mudgee' or 'the Mudgee Camel'; d. January 18, 1900), a 'wild man of Sydney', Australia, colourful politician of that city and co-founder and editor of Truth, a scurrilous but popular journal (first issue, mid-August, 1890). His colleagues on Truth included William Patrick Crick, John Norton and William Nicholas Willis; Henry Lawson was a contributor.

Taylor was a Member of the NSW Legislative Assembly from December 11, 1882 to June 6, 1891. Although he had almost no money he fought Speaker of the Assembly Edmund Barton (from 1901 the first Prime Minister of Australia) in a law suit that went to the Privy Council in England, and though not a trained lawyer, argued his suit and won, refusing then to accept a one-thousand pound damages award on the grounds that it would come from the pockets of the people of New South Wales. A hard-drinking man, he founded a 'home for inebriates' but himself died due to alcoholism, in Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane, Sydney's mental asylum at the time.

Qualifications, occupations and interests 
"Journalist. Educated at Church of England School at Mudgee. Aspired to study Law however, frustrated by poverty from 1872 until 1875; may have worked for Mudgee Independent. joined New South Wales Permanent Artillery as private, court martialled for insubordination and gaoled from June until December 1878; edited Bathurst and Mudgee newspapers. Went to London in 1886 and resigned from Legislative Assembly in 1887 and became examiner of patents; went into voluntary bankruptcy; resigned as examiner of patents in may 1888; founded and conducted Echo Farm Home for male inebriates; became a freelance journalist; admitted to Callan Park in 1898. 


Personal 
"Son of George Taylor, gentleman, and Mrs Sarah Burton Shellum. Married Rosetta Nicholls on 19 January 1885 at Darlington in New South Wales. Church of England."   Source

"To be smashed at all times was considered a badge of honour in the 1890s. When a Presbyterian MP lamented that 'Parliament contained some notorious drunken blackguards and licentious brutes' he drew a swift response from one William Crick, MP [qv  – PW], who bragged that he had been 'a confirmed boozer' since the age of 16.

"'It may be,' he bellowed, 'that the honourable member for Newtown – a human mullet – has poured into his carcass as much grog as would make any other man drunk. But it may be that he has not the necessary mental structure to be affected by alcohol. But suppose that he never did taste strong drink – and he looks foolish enough never to have done so. What great virtue is there in that?'

"Adolphus George Taylor, member for Mudgee, was suspended by Toby Tosspot [common nickname of Sir Edmund Barton, first Prime Minister of Australia – PW] for claiming that no fewer than 35 members of the House were sloshed at one sitting. Soon afterwards he was again suspended for drunkenly alleging that the government was voting £100,000 for the NSW military simply to create a branch of the public service wherein to park 'incapable loafers who had not brains enough to be put even in the Department of Lands'.

"He wasn't expelled for being drunk but for 'persistently and wilfully obstructing the business of the House'.

"Fisticuffs in and around the chamber were commonplace, and the source of a great deal of public amusement. But it was Norton [John Norton – PW], member for Fitzroy – a blackmailing drunkard who made a fortune raking muck in his Truth newspaper – who best embodied the spirit, and the spirits, of the time.

"Having occupied his seat in the House for only three weeks, in a state of near-constant intoxication, he capped off the last evening of the session by relieving himself on the floor of the Legislative Assembly.

"This was considered a bit much even in those days – he was dragged screaming from the House, smashing a glass door on the way out, but the self-appointed 'champion of the people' suffered no electoral harm. He was easily re-elected at the general election soon after."   Source

"The original editor of Truth was Adolphus George Taylor, who was born in a daub-and-wattle hut near Bathurst and died in a sandstone lunatic asylum near Sydney."
Pearl, Cyril, Wild Men of Sydney, Universal Books, Melbourne, 1958

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

1864 Alois Alzheimer (d. 1915), physician, the first to describe Alzheimer's Disease

1877 Jane Bathori, opera singer (d. 1970)

1895 José Carlos Mariaátegui, Peruvian essayist (La escena contemporánea, 'The Contemporary Scene' 925), born in Lima

1906 Margaret Bourke-White, photojournalist

1908 Kathleen Raine (d. July 6, 2003), British poet, critic and independent scholar writing in particular on William Blake and WB Yeats. She became perhaps Britain's most important twentieth-century Nature poet. She enjoyed a tempestuous relationship with author Gavin Maxwell (Ring of Bright Water), and much of her finest poetry was inspired by the landscapes of Wester Ross. 

While in Cambridge she met Jacob Bronowski, William Empson, Humphrey Jennings and Malcolm Lowry. Her first book of poetry, Stone And Flower (1943) was published by Tambimuttu, and illustrated by Barbara Hepworth.

1909 Burl Ives (d. 1995), American singer and actor, who won an Oscar for A Big Country

1914 Ruthven Todd, poet and novelist, born Edinburgh

1916 Georg Henrik von Wright, Finnish philosopher/logician, influential cultural critic/essayist; associated with Vienna School of logical positivists; an executor of the literary estate of German philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein

1919 Dorothy McGuire, actress (d. 2001)

1919 Sam Wanamaker (d. 1993), American actor and director

1921 Gene Barry (b. Eugene Klass, changed his name in honour of his idol, John Barrymore), actor whose most outstanding role was as a scientist who finds himself in the midst of a Martian invasion in the cult sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds (1953)

1925 Pierre Salinger, journalist and JFK's White House Press Secretary

1926 Hermann Kant, author 

1929 Cy Coleman, composer

1933 Jerzy Kosinski (d. 1999), Polish author (The Painted Bird)

1940 Ben Davidson, American football player

1945 Jörg Immendorf, painter

1945 Rod Argent, musician (The Zombies)

1946 Donald Trump, American real estate mogul

1946 Marla Gibbs, actress

1949 Harry Turtledove, science fiction author

1951 Paul Boateng, British politican 

1961 Boy George, English 'gender bender' pop singer, formerly with the band Culture Club (Karma Chameleon)

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June

13 Kitchen Klutzes Of America Day
13 Lobster Day
14 Flag Day
15 Sneak A Kiss Day
15 Smile Power Day
15 Electricity Day
15 A Friend In Need Is A Friend Indeed Day
15 Career Nursing Assistants Day
16 Morticians' Day
17 International Violin Day
17 World Juggling Day
17 Sweden-America Day
17 Sandcastle Day (Oregon, USA)
17 Oyster Festival (California)
17 Hollerin' Contest (North Carolina)
17 Pepperfest (Oklahoma)
18 Go Fishing Day
18 Splurge Day
19 Butterfly Day
19 Juneteenth
19 World Sauntering Day
20 Vanilla Milkshake Day
20 Ice Cream Soda Day
20 West Virginia Day
21 Summer Solstice
21 Cuckoo Warning Day
21 Peaches And Cream Day
22 Chocolate Eclair Day
23 Typewriter Day
24 Flying Saucer Day
24 Swim Day
24 Blueberry Festival ((New Jersey, USA)
24 Feast Of John The Baptist
25 Strawberry Parfait Day
25 Leon Day
26 Chocolate Pudding Day
26 Beauticians' Day
27 Sunglasses Day
28 Treaty Day
29 Remote Control Day
30 Sky Day
30 Meteorite Day

  ... More Events

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1098 Siege of Antioch during the First Crusade: the Spear of Destiny was found as prophesied in a dream. [More at June 10; see also July 15, 1099.]

1381 King Richard II of England met the leaders of Peasants' Revolt.

1645 English Civil War: Battle of Naseby – Oliver Cromwell's troops defeated the Royalist forces of Prince Rupert, at Naseby, near Leicester, England.

1755 Dr Samuel Johnson's Dictionary went on sale for the first time (published on April 15 qv).

Unidentified quotations from Dr Johnson's Dictionary

1775 The Continental Congress established the United States Army as the first USA military service.

1777 The Stars and Stripes was adopted by Congress as the Flag of the United States.

 

1789 After 41 days at sea, Captain William Bligh (1754 - 1817) and 18* loyal crewmen arrived at the island of Timor after drifting 5,600 km (3,480 mi) following the mutiny on Bligh's ship HMS Bounty, when they were put to sea in a small boat with provisions sufficient to reach the most accessible ports, a sextant and a pocket watch, but no charts or compass.

Bligh's seamanship and leadership qualities had kept all the men alive although beset by near starvation and extreme thirst. Bligh oversaw the distribution of tiny amounts of water to each man per day, and almost all survived an impossible situation. The only casualty was one crewman killed by hostile natives.

In 1792 Bligh returned to Tahiti, collected the breadfruit seedlings, which was his original purpose before the mutiny, and successfully brought them to the West Indies. He became governor of New South Wales in 1805. There he suffered another mutiny, this time the Rum Rebellion, and was imprisoned from 1808 to 1810.

"After being cast off HMS Bounty, Bligh and his nineteen loyalists began their epic journey to the nearby Dutch colony of Timor in an overcrowded launch for nearly forty-seven days and 3,600 miles. Bligh's great achievement in this predicament was that he navigated the launch without the aid of a chart or any means of obtaining the longitude. Whilst struggling to survive, Bligh produced highly accurate charts and surveys of the seas and of the terrain, such as the Fijian Islands and the north east coast of Australia. On 17 June 1789, the launch finally reached Coupang in Timor. On the 14th March 1790, Bligh returned to Portsmouth and he went on to publish his account of the mutiny and of his voyage to Timor in the July of that year. Bligh was hailed as a hero."   Source

* Some sources say 19.

Replica of Bligh's longboat    Bounty replica

A Voyage to the South Sea by William Bligh - Project Gutenberg    More

1800 Napoleon defeated the Austrians at Marengo.

1801 The death, in London, of Benedict Arnold, American general.

1814 The Netherlands and Belgium signed the Treaty of London.

1816 The Society for Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace was founded, London.

1822 Charles Babbage proposed a difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled 'Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables'.

A History of Information Technology and Systems

Related topic: Ada Byron King, in the Book of Days

1834 Isaac Fischer Jr, of Springfield, Vermont, USA, Jr patented sandpaper

1841 The first Parliament of Canada met, in Kingston, Ontario.

1846 Foundation of the California Republic.

1863 American Civil War: Battle of Second Winchester.

1872 Trade unions were legalised in Canada

1881 John McTammany, Jr patented the player piano.

1883 Poet and translator Edward FitzGerald (The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám ) died at 74 in Merton, Norfolk, UK.

1893 Paddy Hannan discovered gold at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

1900 The Republic of Hawaii became a United States territory.

1900 The Reichstag approved a second law that allowed the expansion of the German navy.

1905 Russian Revolution of 1905: The Battleship Potemkin mutiny, Odessa. Part of the first Russian Revolution in which thousands participated, and the soviet (councilist) form first appeared. The mutiny was the basis for the film Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin) by Sergei M Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, with music scored by Dmitri Shostakovich.

The ship was named after Prince Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Russian statesman and favourite of Catherine II. In April of 1919, the interventionists blew it up in Sevastopol so it wouldn't fall into Bolshevik hands. After the Russian Civil War, Potemkin was raised from the bottom of the sea and dismantled because of irreparable damage.  

 

1913 Large numbers of suffragettes and the general public attended the funeral of Emily Davison, who died when trying to pull up Anmer, King George V's horse, at the 1913 Epsom Derby, in a publicity stunt that went wrong (see June 4).

Aussie suffragette who brought a Police Commissioner off his horse in 1912

A world chronology of women's electoral rights    More

 

1914 Italy: End of 'The Red Week of Ancône'; a general strike was broken by the treason of the Socialists and their trade union. Errico Malatesta, escaping the police, was forced again to flee into exile, to London.  Source

1917 Anarcho-feminist author and lecturer, Emma Goldman, ignored rumours of a death threat and spoke at an anti-conscription meeting chaired by her friend Alexander Berkman. Police raided and arrested all men of draft age who could not show proof of registration.  

1917 For the first time, London was bombed by German planes.

1919 Leon Trotsky, chief of the Red Army, (aka The Red Butcher of Kronstadt) drafted an order banning the Makhnovist (anarchist) Congress, accusing them of opposing Soviet power in the Ukraine. Trotsky called for the arrest of the delegates.

The Makhnovists rejected the Bolshevik corruption of the soviets and instead proposed "the free and completely independent soviet system of working people without authorities and their arbitrary laws". Their proclamations stated that the "working people themselves must freely choose their own soviets, which carry out the will and desires of the working people themselves, that is to say, ADMINISTRATIVE, not ruling soviets." (Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement)

Source: The Daily Bleed

1919 The first first non-stop transatlantic flight: Capt. John Alcock and Lt. Arthur Brown left in a Vickers Vimy bomber 1,900 miles non-stop from St John's, Newfoundland, Canada, to Clifden, County Galway, Ireland, arriving 16 hours, 12 minutes later on June 15.

1923 Warren G Harding (1865 - 1923) became the first President of the United States to broadcast a message over the radio. The occasion: the dedication of the Francis Scott Key Memorial in Baltimore.

1924 San Pedro, California, USA: The IWW (International Wokers of the World or 'Wobblies') labor hall was raided by the authorities. Children were scalded, and the hall demolished.

1937 Pennsylvania became the first (and only) of the USA to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday.

1938 Dorothy Lathrop won the first Caldecott Medal.

1940 World War II: Paris fell under German occupation.

1941 Mass deportations by Soviet Union authorities took place in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

1942 The first bazooka rocket gun was produced, Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA.

1944 The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation won a majority in Saskatchewan, Canada, elections, forming the first socialist government in North America.

1947 Following the landmark case, Mendez v. Westminster, California Governor Earl Warren signed a law repealing all racial segregation statutes in the California Education Code.

More

1948

GUNMEN STEAL RARE BIBLE
Farmer Wounded, Tied; Relic 400 years old
HARRISONVILLE, Mo., June 14 1948

Sheriff's deputies searched today for three gunmen who shot an elderly farmer when he refused to tell them where he had hid an ancient and rare German Lutheran Bible. After wounding 63-year-old J. Frank Miller in his home seven miles north of here yesterday, the bandits ransacked his house; they found the Bible in a bureau drawer but passed up nearly $100 in currency. The Bible was one of two in existence and was "between 400 and 500 years old."

"I once read in a newspaper," he said, "that a similar Bible, not quite as old, had sold for $87,000 and is in a museum in England."

(from a newspaper clipping found in an old German Lutheran Bible, USA)

 

1949 The state of Vietnam was formed.

1951 The unveiling of UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer, designed for the USA Census Bureau.

1952 The keel was laid for the nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus.

1954 USA President Dwight Eisenhower signed an order adding the words 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance, a chauvinistic text recited in many American schools.

On October 21, 1892, the Pledge was first made publicly. It was written by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, but the reference to 'under God' was not added until later, following a lobbying campaign by the Knights of Columbus – a Catholic fraternal organization – and others. Congress approved the addition of the words 'under God' within the phrase 'one nation indivisible', and on June 14, 1954, President Eisenhower signed the bill into law. This was despite the fact that the US Founding fathers made it clear that the nation was not founded on Christianity or any other religion.

A negative viewpoint on Francis Bellamy and his 'Pledge'    More   And more

1954 The first nationwide civil defence drill was held in the United States.

1964 American author (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) Ken Kesey (1935 - 2001) and his band of Merry Pranksters, including Ken Babbs and Neal Cassady at the wheel, left Perry Lane in Furthur, their psychedelic 1939 International Harvester school bus, and began their legendary cross-country bus trip to the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

There they attended a publication party for Kesey's new novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, checked out the World's Fair, and paid a visit to Timothy Leary and his associates at the Millbrook estate of Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon fortune.

They arrived in New York City in mid-July 1964 and were introduced to Jack Kerouac at a fateful party. Details of the trip came to be chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Source

Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list    CounterCulture Wiki    Furthurmore    More   And more

 

1965 Austrian Jewish mystic, philosopher Martin Buber died.

1966  The Netherlands: The second day of a three-day confrontation between Amsterdam police and demonstrating construction workers with Provo supporters, Dam Square.

"Constant Nieuwenhuis, another artist, was instrumental in shaping the White Philosophy, which considered work (especially mundane factory labor) obsolete. Provo's renunciation of work appealed to the Nozems – and marked an important ideological split with capitalism, communism and socialism, all of which cherished work as a value in itself. Provo, however, sympathized more with Marx' anarchist son-in-law Paul Lafargue, author of 'The Right to Laziness'.

"The most famous of all white plans was the White Bike Plan, envisioned as the ultimate solution to the 'traffic terrorism of a motorized minority.' The brain-child of Industrial designer Luud. Schimmelpenninck, the White Bike Plan proposed the banning of. environmentally noxious cars from the inner city, to be replaced by bicycles. Of course, the bikes were to be provided free by the city. They would be painted white and permanently unlocked, to secure their public availability …

"Van Duyn's theories of modem life were quite similar to Grootveld's: labor and the ruling class had merged into one big, gray middle-class. This boring bourgeoisie was living in a catatonic state, its creativity burnt out by TV."   Source

Situationist International

"As both political philosophy and personal lifestyle, social anarchism promotes community self-reliance, direct participation in political decision-making, respect for nature, and nonviolent paths to peace and justice." http://www.nothingness.org/

Weather Underground Provo Forecast – it sounds like a radical '60s group … but is it?

1966 The Vatican announced the abolition of the Index of Prohibited Books.

1968 Leftist child-care expert Dr Benjamin Spock and three others were convicted of conspiring to counsel draft evasion. He refused to support George McGovern (backed by most liberal antiwar activists) in 1972, and ran as the candidate of the People's Party. 

1968 Jimi Hendrix recorded Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)?

Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list

1968 After abandoning a career as an engineer at 34, producing more than ten volumes of poetry, publishing an astonishing range of translations, including classical poetry and drama, anthologies and significant critical essays, the 1959 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Salvatore Quasimodo died in Naples.

1972 The USA Environmental Agency banned DDT.

1979 Rolling Stone reported that after 10 years, Little Feat had broken up. Two weeks later, Little Feat leader/guitarist/singer Lowell George died of a heart attack.

1982 Falklands War: Argentina surrendered to the United Kingdom on the Falkland Islands, ending a bloody 74-day conflict that had Atilla the Hen (Margaret Thatcher) "rejoicing". The war had been so expensive that the UK government would have saved money by repatriating every Falkland Islander to Britain and giving them a million pounds sterling in cash. About 1,000 more military personnel died than was the population of the islands they fought over.

The worst-reported war since the Crimean

"… The fact that the rest of the world viewed the war as a bizarre and brainless squabble between nostalgic imperialism and nostalgic fascism was irrelevant; we didn't care what the rest of the world thought, except to imagine that it was impressed. ('What did you make of that war?' I asked a Swiss friend recently. He paused, frowned, and went into maximum-politeness mode. 'I thought it was … ridiculous,' he replied.) …

"…The fact that there were a mere 1,800 islanders, and that their way of life was preserved at the cost of 1,000 British casualties and 1,800 Argentinian ones did not seem a grossly stupid and expensive way of conducting foreign policy …"   Source

 

1982 There were 1,653 arrested at the US, USSR, French and Chinese Missions to United Nations, New York City, in Blockade the Bombmakers nuclear disarmament sit-ins.

1983 Protests took place in Santiago, Chile, against the regime of General Augusto Pinochet.

1985 Hezbollah Shiite Moslem gunmen commandeered TWA Flight 847, which was carrying 153 passengers and crew from Athens to Rome. The ordeal ended 17 days later in Beirut, where one of the  hostages, a US sailor, was killed.

1989 Former USA president Ronald Reagan was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. As Reagan was not a Britsih subject, he was not permitted to use the honorific 'Sir'.

1989 Alleged American actress Zsa Zsa Gabor was arrested for slapping a Beverly Hills motorcycle patrolman.

1990 Street fighting broke out in Bucharest, Romania, between pro-democracy students and miners supporting the Iliescu regime.

1991 NATO and five Eastern European nations approved a compromise, ending a dispute over a US-Soviet treaty limiting conventional armies in Europe.

1998 "Mike Birch, taking part in the Carlsberg Single-Handed Transatlantic Race, hit two whales in his trimaran. Five days later, competitor David Sellings found his 25ft sloop Hiccup surrounded by whales, squeaking and snorting. The next day there were 50 or 60 of them. They closed in and smashed the rudder. As he put out a Mayday call and gathered his possessions, the biggest whale smashed the yacht and sank it. Sellings got his dinghy inflated just in time and was later picked up from the air. As soon as the yacht was sunk, all the whales disappeared."   Source

1999 The South African National Assembly elected former Communist Thabo Mbeki as president, succeeding the retiring Nelson Mandela. The 56-year-old Mbeki had served as deputy president under Mandela.

2000 Local residents in Hinchley Wood, in the Elmbridge district of Surrey in South East England, United Kingdom, moved caravans onto the parking lot of their well-loved local pub, The Hinchley Wood, which was leased by McDonald's – to occupy the site and prevent the old pub from being turned into a new store.

On June 14, 2000, after exactly 18 months of controversy and determined opposition, McDonald's threw in the towel and handed back the lease on the pub to the original owners.

On June 16, after an incredible 552-day, 24hr-a-day continuous occupation (possibly the longest protest occupation of its kind) local villagers organised as Residents Against McDonald's (RAM) moved their caravans off the site and celebrated a historic victory.

More

 

2000 In the biggest step toward peace since the end of the Korean War, the leaders of North and South Korea signed an agreement pledging to work for reconciliation and eventual reunification.

2000 Former Brazilian slave, Maria do Carmo Jeronimo, died, aged 129 years, having lived in three centuries. Jeronimo died 112 years after Brazil's abolition of slavery on May 13, 1888.

"According to her baptismal records, Maria do Carmo was born into slavery on March 5, 1871, in the southeastern city of Carmo de Minas. The year of Maria's birth saw the enactment of Brazil's Law of the Free Womb. Under this law children born to slave mothers in 1871 and after, were to be held in a state of semi-freedom until their twenty-first birthday when they would become fully free. But the law was a sham; it was meant, as they say in Brazil, "para ingles ver " ("for the English to see"). And so Maria do Carmo had to remain in slavery until 1888."   Source

2002 Twelve were killed and 50 injured by a car bomb explosion in front of the USA consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.

2004 The Workers Party of Bangladesh split, as Khandaker Ali Abbas left to form a new party.

 

Tomorrow: Midsummer dancing madness

 

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Wikipedia and David Brown's prodigious Daily Bleed are both excellent resources that aid my research.
I frequently make use of their generously liberal 'fair use', 'copyleft' and 'anti-copyright' policies, with much gratitude.
© My own copyright policy is also liberal, but as this is my livelihood, conditions apply.

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