Yankee Stadium holds Lou Gehrig Day to honour baseball star affected by ALS. Lou Gehrig went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, but it was his baseball talents that inspired the New York Yankees to sign him on in 1923. Born in New York City on June 19, 1903, Gehrig was the only one of his parents’ four children to survive. By age 20, only months into his Yankees career, he was already playing for the majors. Two years later he was assigned first base, a position he held for 13 yea...
Jul 04, 2017•2 min
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the U.S. Civil Rights Act. President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign for a new American civil rights act met with such heavy opposition from Southern Democrats, it was stymied for several years. Still, in a national speech on June 11, 1963, President Kennedy outlined the need for African Americans to receive legal protection. When Kennedy was assassinated five months later, it was up to Lyndon B. Johnson to decide if he wanted to push forward with the new propos...
Jul 03, 2017•2 min
Ralph Steinhauer becomes Alberta’s first aboriginal lieutenant governor. Ralph Garvin Steinhauer was born June 8, 1905 in Morley, Alberta, which at that time was part of the Northwest Territories. Steinhauer, a full-treaty Cree, was educated at the Brandon Indian Residential School in Manitoba. At 18, he joined the United Farmers of Alberta, where he would later hold prominent positions in the agricultural, business and First Nations communities – including a stint as president of the Indian Ass...
Jul 02, 2017•2 min
Dominion Day becomes Canada Day. Almost a year after Canada became a federal country, Governor General Lord Monck called for a celebratory day. Years later, July 1st became known as Dominion Day. It was almost 100 years before Canadians marked the day with organized celebrations. By then, the world’s second largest country boasted five time zones and very lively cultural and linguistic differences; it was intact and thriving. From the original four provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontari...
Jul 01, 2017•2 min
Chinese Immigration Act aimed at excluding Chinese immigrants gets royal nod. Since Chinese immigrants were seen as cheap labour, some politicians feared that if B.C. had too many of them, it could lower the living standards of non-Chinese Canadians. This is the logic by which the British Columbia legislature passed a number of anti-Chinese laws. Although it was not their jurisdiction, they also persuaded federal lawmakers to do the same. On June 30, 1923, the Chinese Immigration Act obtained ro...
Jun 30, 2017•2 min
End to New York’s Stonewall Riots heralds start of modern gay rights. Before the 1970s, the sexual activities of American gays and lesbians were either illegal or socially shunned. Few legal protections applied to them, and discrimination and harassment abounded. Police frequently raided gay bars, after which newspapers would publish the names and photos of arrestees, with tragic results for these individuals’ lives. June 27, 1969 made history, however, when some patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a ...
Jun 29, 2017•2 min
Steven Fletcher becomes Canada’s first quadriplegic elected to House of Commons. Steven Fletcher was born on June 17, 1972 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where his father was working as an engineer. Fletcher followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming an engineer, but at the age of 23, while working as a mining engineer in Manitoba, he suffered paralysis from his neck down when his car hit a moose while he was driving. A year later, while still coming to terms with his disability, Fletcher return...
Jun 28, 2017•2 min
Canada proclaims Multiculturalism Day. While the United States prides itself on being a “melting pot,” Canadians prefer the term “mosaic” when boasting of the country’s multicultural nature. Canada formally enshrined multiculturalism into its Charter of Rights and Freedoms through section 27, which reads, “This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canada.” Thus, in November 2002, the Canadian government proclai...
Jun 27, 2017•2 min
Clara Brett Martin becomes “student-at-law” with Toronto law firm. Clara Brett Martin was born in Toronto in 1874, the youngest of 12 children. Along with her siblings, Martin was schooled at home before graduating with high honours from Trinity College with a major in mathematics at the age of 16. After a year of teaching, Martin petitioned the Law Society of Upper Canada to become a law student, only to be rejected. But after her issue went to the Ontario legislature and then back to the Law S...
Jun 26, 2017•2 min
Kim Campbell named Canada’s first woman prime minister. Avril Phaedra Douglas Campbell was born in Port Alberni, British Columbia on March 10, 1947. She changed her name to Kim when she was just 12 years old. After high school, Campbell studied politics and government at the University of B.C. and the London School of Economics, then lectured at UBC She graduated from UBC’s law school while serving as a Vancouver school board trustee. She ran unsuccessfully on a provincial level with the governi...
Jun 25, 2017•2 min
Quebec’s Saint Jean Baptiste Day gets its origins. The pagan celebrations of the summer solstice turned into a religious celebration during the reign of King Clovis of France in the 5th century. He decided to mark the birth of John the Baptist, the man who baptized Jesus Christ, on June 24. Given the date’s proximity to the summer solstice, it’s celebrated with bonfires symbolizing lighting up the world. European Catholics, especially in France, celebrate it with vigor, as do Quebecers, who call...
Jun 24, 2017•2 min
Aboriginal Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper stops controversial Meech Lake Accord. In 1981, the Canadian federal and provincial governments agreed to take control of their own constitution, find a way to amend it, and put into place the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quebec, however, refused to sign. When Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney came to office in 1984, he promised to include Quebec by amending the constitution. In early June 1987, at Meech Lake, Quebec, the prime minist...
Jun 23, 2017•2 min
Aviator and writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh is born. Anne Morrow – born on June 22, 1906, in Englewood, New Jersey – met the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh while her father was ambassador to Mexico. They married in 1929, just two years after he’d flown his “Spirit of St. Louis” plane from New York to Paris, and one year after she’d graduated from college with two literary awards. Over the next two years, Lindbergh learned to fly, became the first American woman to get her glider’s license and ear...
Jun 22, 2017•2 min
Canada’s governor general proclaims National Aboriginal Day. Canada’s aboriginal population has experienced many hardships, and typically found its own celebrations ignored by most non-aboriginals. Thus, a day that celebrated aboriginal culture and history was in the works for years. First suggested by the National Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of First Nations) in 1982, then recognized by the Quebec legislature in 1990, it finally became reality when Canada’s governor general proclaimed ...
Jun 21, 2017•2 min
Mayann Francis becomes Nova Scotia’s first black Lieutenant-Governor. Mayann Francis was born in the Whitney Pier district near Sydney on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. As an adult, she received her bachelor of arts from Saint Mary’s University and a masters of public administration from New York University. The daughter of a Cuban archpriest father, in 2003 Francis earned a certificate in theological studies from the Atlantic School of Theology. She worked for the Nova Scotia human rights com...
Jun 20, 2017•2 min
Canada urged to recognize Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 as genocide. In 1932, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death in his quest to force his farm collectives scheme on peasants, halt Ukraine’s growing independence movement and crush the nationalist spirit of the region’s people. That year, the Soviets increased its quota of grain from the Ukraine by 44 per cent by posting Soviet soldiers and the dreaded NKVD secret police to protect silos from theft by people literal...
Jun 19, 2017•2 min
Sally Ride becomes first woman on a space shuttle mission. Sally Ride was born in Los Angeles, California on May 26, 1951. After attaining her bachelor of science, bachelor of arts, masters of science and doctorate of physics from Stanford University, she was chosen by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a candidate for astronaut. A year and a half later, in August 1979, Ride completed her training and evaluation process to become eligible for her first assignment. She wo...
Jun 18, 2017•2 min
U.S. Supreme Court outlaws mandatory Bible reading and prayer in public schools. For years, many American public schools held Bible readings and prayer sessions, some of which were mandatory, and some of which allowed students to excuse themselves. By the late 1950s, a growing number of students and parents took exception to these Christian ceremonies. In Pennsylvania, state law required schools to read 10 passages from the Bible each morning, followed by the Lord’s Prayer. Even though the Abing...
Jun 17, 2017•2 min
152 children killed during peaceful demonstration in Soweto, South Africa. During South Africa’s years of white minority rule under its apartheid system, many people protested the inhumane and discriminatory treatment of the country’s black majority. But when the government forced Afrikaans – the language of the blacks’ oppressors – on black school children, it went a step too far. On June 16, 1976, 10,000 children in the township of Soweto gathered to protest the use of Afrikaans in their schoo...
Jun 16, 2017•2 min
Supreme Court hears case to decide if pregnancy discrimination is sex discrimination. Stella Bliss went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada when she was denied benefits under the Unemployment Insurance Act because she was experiencing pregnancy-related health problems. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that although only women could get pregnant, any inequality Bliss experienced stemmed from “nature,” not from sex discrimination. In other words, discrimination based on pregnancy was not di...
Jun 15, 2017•2 min
Chinese police announce recovery of hundreds of slaves. In the communist regime of China, where dissent is given short shrift and freedom of the press is anything but, the internet has proven to be very effective in getting government authorities to take some action. For years there had been reports of Chinese children, youths and adults working as literal slaves in brick kiln camps that fuel the enormous construction growth in China’s economy. Most of those reports fell on deaf ears as the auth...
Jun 14, 2017•2 min
Henry Vlug called to the bar, becoming Canada’s first deaf lawyer. Henry Vlug was born in 1944 in Nieuwer Amstel, Netherlands. He moved to Powell River, B.C. in 1952. He became deaf just before grade two, and after public and private schools, graduated from the Jericho Hill School for the Deaf in Vancouver. His post-secondary education led him to a teaching career for ten years before he pursued law school at the University of British Columbia in 1982. After articling, on June 13, 1986, Vlug was...
Jun 13, 2017•2 min
Ontario Premier William Davis announces full funding for Catholic schools. While Canada’s constitution has long allowed for some public schools to serve Quebec’s Protestant and Ontario’s Catholic children, Ontario’s public funding for its Catholic schools extended only to grade 10. In 1968, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA) made it a priority to change that. For 16 years, the OECTA helped organize teachers, administrators, parents and students to address the imbalance of...
Jun 12, 2017•2 min
Canada holds first Special Olympics to inspire fitness and competition amongst mentally disabled. Research in the early 1960s showed that mentally disabled children were only half as fit as non-disabled children. Dr. Frank Hayden of London, Ontario challenged the idea that this stemmed from their mental disability. With his research pointing a finger at their sedentary lifestyle rather than an inability to exercise, Hayden sought to create Canada-wide sports programs for the mentally challenged....
Jun 11, 2017•2 min
Douglas Jung becomes Canada’s first Chinese Canadian member of Parliament. Douglas Jung was born in Victoria, British Columbia on February 24, 1924. Following World War II service in the Pacific Command Security Intelligence, Jung returned to Canada to pursue his education at the University of British Columbia. The first Chinese Canadian veteran to receive a university education through Veteran’s Affairs, he graduated with both arts and law degrees before being called to the bar in 1954. As a yo...
Jun 10, 2017•2 min
Upper Canada partially abolishes slavery. Canada, like other Western countries in the 18th century, allowed its citizens to own slaves. In fact, for many Canadians, slave ownership was fashionable, and the Imperial Statute of 1790 required nothing of slave owners but feeding and clothing their slaves. One man who disapproved of slavery, however – Upper Canada’s new Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe – began efforts in 1791 to have it abolished. He was joined by the attorney general for Upper...
Jun 09, 2017•2 min
Ruling overturned for disgraced aboriginal leader David Ahenakew. David Ahenakew was a distinguished member of the Saskatchewan First Nations community. He’d given years of service at the helm of the Assembly of First Nations and had been recognized for other accomplishments with the prestigious Order of Canada. So onlookers were shocked when on December 13, 2002, at an aboriginal health-care conference, he went into a racist tirade with slurs against Jews, Indo Canadians and other immigrants to...
Jun 08, 2017•2 min
Captain of St. Louis informs Jewish passengers they must return to Europe. In Germany on November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi troops went on a rampage, killing 91 Jews, arresting 30,000, sending many to concentration camps and destroying thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. Following this event, known as Kristallnacht, Jews tried desperately to flee Germany. However, very few countries were willing to take more than their allotted quotas. On May 13, 1939, 937 men, women and children – ...
Jun 07, 2017•2 min
Shanawdithit, Newfoundland’s last surviving Beothuk aboriginal, dies. Hundreds of years before European settlers arrived, groups of aboriginals crossed the Strait of Belle Isle to live in what became Newfoundland. Known as Beothuk, they were the first indigenous people to meet European settlers in the 1500s, and archaeologists estimate they numbered between 500 and 1,000. The Beothuk tradition of painting their bodies with red ochre prompted settlers to call all aboriginals “reds.” As European s...
Jun 06, 2017•2 min
United Nations creates World Environment Day. In response to growing concern about the planet’s sustainability, the United Nations held the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment from June 5 to 16, 1972. The conference concluded with a declaration that urged all nations to work for a better environment. The UN General Assembly also created the United Nations Environment Program, whose mission was “to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, ...
Jun 05, 2017•2 min
