Three events concerning British Royalty are marked on this date, two of them involving Henry VIII’s wives. In 1499 Catherine of Aragon was married by proxy to Arthur, Prince of Wales when she was just 14 years old and he was just 15. He died a few short years later and Catherine became Henry’s first wife and gave birth to the future Queen Mary I. In 1536 Anne Boleyn, who had become Henry’s second wife, and gave birth to the future Queen Elizabeth I, failed to give Henry a male heir (one son was stillborn) and thus was tried on charges of adultery, incest, and treason and was executed. Then on a more happy note in 2018 Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were married in St George’s Chapel in Windsor.

Frenchman Jean-Pierre Christin developed the centigrade temperature scale in 1743. Napoleon Bonaparte founded the Legion of Honor in 1802. And Parks Canada, the world’s first national parks service, was established in 1911.

In 1848 Mexico ratified the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and ceded control to the US of California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of 4 US modern-day states. In 1921 in reaction to the anti-immigrant feelings and the first Red Scare after WWI the US Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas for immigration.

The Quaker abolitionist philanthropist of Baltimore Johns Hopkins (who has a university named after him) was born in 1795. The father of modern Turkey and its first president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was officially born on this date in 1881. Francis Biddle, lead judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials came onto the scene in 1886. And the father of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh also burst forth into the world in 1890.

This was also the birthday for American flyer and Medal of Honor winner in WWI Frank Luke (1897); civil rights activist Malcolm X (1925); American journalist Jim Lehrer (1934); American director, producer, and screenwriter Nora Ephron (1941), and British rocker, lead guitarist of the Who, Pete Townsend (1945).

Two Brits passed away on this date – long-time Prime Minister William E Gladstone(1898) and Colonel and archeologist T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia (1935). Two American writers and a poet also passed – novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne(1864), Poet Ogden Nash (1971) , and chronicler of the Titanic sinking (A Night to Remember) author Walter Lord(2002). And thirty-one years after her husband was brutally gunned down in Dallas, Jackie Kennedy Onassis was laid to rest in 1994.

Today is Hepatitis Testing Day in the US