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June 21 (Northern Hemisphere)
It seems like just six months ago we were celebrating solstice…
There’s more reason to celebrate this time around, in this seasonally-affected author’s opinion: this solstice marks the longest day of the year rather than the shortest.
The changing of the seasons is due, of course, to the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth’s axis, a tilt which we in our everyday lives take for granted, but which has …Read more
3rd Sunday in June June 19, 2011 June 17, 2012 June 16, 2013
Spectators and victims of the Monongah Mine Disaster, 1907
100 years ago the congregation of Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church in Fairmont, West Virginia gathered to pay tribute to the 362 men, many of them fathers, killed at the Monongah Mine disaster of 1907. The victims were largely from poor immigrant families, Italian, Greek, Slav, Polish, and Russian. The accident left 250 women widows and …Read more
June 16
June 16 is Bloomsday (also Blooms Day) in Dublin, but it’s not a spring or solstice festival and it has nothing to do with Irish wildflowers.
Irish wildflowers © Jenny Seawright
No, Bloomsday honours Leopold Bloom, who spent a day traipsing through the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904—in James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses.
Each year on Bloomsday, Joyce lovers retrace the steps of the fictional characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Many old landmarks remain, …Read more
June 16
With the coming of summer, many students are struck with a debilitating illness known as cantgotoschoolitis. Symptoms may include inability to pay attention in class, wandering eyes, and an overactive imagination.
With students yearning so badly to get out of class, it’s hard to believe that on this day in 1976, many young students gave their lives fighting just to receive a fair and equal education.
In 1953, the white Apartheid government of …Read more
June 15
June 15 is Fly a Kite Day (or Go Fly a Kite Day), ostensibly honoring the anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s famous electricity experiment in 1752.
Ben Flies a Kite
However, Franklin never specified the date of the experiment. Written records reveal that he only narrowed down the timeframe to a month (June 1752) a full fourteen years after the fact. Strange circumstances like these have led some historians to cast doubts as to the veracity …Read more
June 14
“We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag which we honor and under which we serve is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation…
We celebrate the day of its birth; and from its birth until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated on high the symbol of great events, of a great plan of life worked out by a great people.
“We are about …Read more
A living flag, U.S. Naval training station, Great Lakes, IL, 1917.
from Flag Day Part I
A few weeks later, on June 4, 1917, Kimber presented the flag in a more somber ceremony, largely for the American Ambulance Corps volunteers who were already stationed near Treveray, France.
“My instructions were to bring the flag as quickly as I could, and that I have done to the best of my ability. You know the history of this flag: how it …Read more
June 8
Happy Lindisfarne!
Lindisfarne is a small island in the northeast of England—also known as Holy Island—that houses a small castle and monastery. The “island” is actually connected to the mainland by a small strip of land that is revealed by the changing tide twice a day…
But in the Asatru tradition, Lindisfarne Day is a holiday celebrating what is generally conceived to be the beginning of the Viking Era, on June 8th, 793 AD.
On that …Read more
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