Looked up historical events that happened on my birthday because I was bored

[Your Local Freak]

November 17th btw

• 1839 Giuseppe Verdi’s first opera “Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio” premieres at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (Verdi, one of my favorite Baroque composers, my beloved )
• 1863 Abraham Lincoln begins first draft of his Gettysburg Address
• 1888 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducts the premiere of his 5th Symphony at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia
• 1889 Union Pacific begins daily through service, Chicago-Portland & San Francisco
• 1956 USSR performs atmospheric nuclear test
• 1974 Swedish pop group ABBA begins their first international tour at the Kalkonerteater in Copenhagen, Denmark
• 2008 Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy, slides into its first recession in seven years (My birth year)

These were just the interesting ones (or at least ones I found interesting).

[somnium]

♥『𝑀𝑜𝓍𝓍𝒾』♥ what about your half birthday?

[Your Local Freak]

somnium May 17th? Oh boy let me look

[Your Local Freak]

• 218: 7th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet (Yes, you read that right. The year is 218.)
• 1536: Four men accused of being Anne Boleyn’s ‘lovers’ are executed, shortly before her own beheading
• 1590: Anne of Denmark is crowned Queen of Scotland
• 1713: Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi’s first opera “Ottone in villa” opens at Teatro delle Grazie in Vincenza, Republic of Venice (now Italy)
• 1733: Great Britain passes the Molasses Act, putting high tariffs on rum and molasses imported to the colonies from a country other than British possessions
• 1824: The diaries of Lord Byron are burnt by six of the poet’s friends at the office of John Murray in London, sometimes described as the greatest crime in literary history
• 1861: The first color photograph was taken by Thomas Sutton, using James Clerk Maxwell’s three-color method
• 1881: Fredrick Douglass appointed recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia
• 1890: Pietro Mascagni’s opera “Cavalleria Rusticana” premieres in Rome at the Teatro Costanzi
• 1897: The first successful submarine was launched in the USA by its designer, John Philip Holland
• 1904: Maurice Ravel’s song cycle “Shéhérazade” premieres with Jeanne Hatto as soprano, at the Salle Nouveau Théâtre, Paris, France
• 1939: The Glenn Miller Orchestra begins a three-month engagement at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, New York
• 1940: Germany occupies Brussels, Belgium and begins invasion of France (It only gets worse from here.)
• 1942: Dutch SS vows loyalty to Hitler
• 1944: Allied air raid on Surabaya, Java
• 1944: US General Dwight Eisenhower sets D-Day for June 5
• 1959: Sanctuary of Christ the King inaugurated, a 28 meter (92 ft) high monument and shrine overlooking Lisbon, Portugal by sculptor Francisco Franco de Sousa
• 1970: nonymous buyer purchases one of the pairs of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” for $15,000 at MGM Studio auction, and donates them to the Smithsonian Institution
• 1971: “Godspell” premieres off-Broadway
• 1974: Dmitri Shostakovich completes his 15th String quartet
• 2020: Former US President Barack Obama criticizes the US government’s handling of the pandemic during an online address to graduates, saying officials aren’t even pretending to be in charge (I mean he has a point.)