On This Day:
Wednesday October 23, 2013 This is the 296th day of the year, with 69 days remaining in 2013. Fact of the Day: mattress The history of the word mattress shows how the object came to Europe and then the Americas from the Middle East. During the earlier part of the Middle Ages, Arabic culture was more advanced than that of Europe. One of the amenities of life enjoyed by the Arabs was sleeping on cushions thrown on the floor. Our word is derived from the Arabic word matrah meaning "place where something is thrown," "carpet or cushion." This kind of sleeping surface was adopted by the Europeans during the Crusades, and the Arabic word was taken into Old Italian and then into Old French, from which comes the Middle English word materas, first recorded c 1300.
Holidays Feast day of St. Severino Boethius, St. Severinus or Seurin of Bordeaux, St. Elfleda or Ethelfled, St. Allucio, St. Ignatius of Constantinople, St. Theodoret, St. Romanus of Rouen, and St. John of Capistrano.
The swallows leave San Juan Capistrano.
Hungary: Anniversary of Declaration of Independence.
Thailand: Chulalongkorn Day.
Events 4004 B.C.E. - According to 17th century divine James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and Dr. John Lightfoot of Cambridge, the world was created on this day, a Sunday, at 9 a.m.
1642 - Battle of Edgehill, the first major conflict of the English Civil War, took place.
1864 - Union General Samuel R. Curtis and his troops defeated Confederate General Stirling Price's army in Missouri.
1915 - Around 25,000 women marched in New York City, demanding the right to vote.
1941 - U.S. Senate passed the $5.98 billion supplemental Lend-Lease bill, bringing the country closer to direct involvement in World War II.
1944 - The biggest naval engagement of World War II began, between the United States and Japan, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
1946 - The United Nations General Assembly convened in New York for the first time, in a Flushing Meadow auditorium.
1956 - Hungarian students and workers demonstrated in Budapest against 10 years of Soviet Union domination and Communist rule.
1973 - President Richard Nixon agreed to turn White House tape recordings requested by the Watergate special prosecutor over to Judge John J. Sirica.
1978 - China and Japan exchanged treaty ratification documents in Tokyo, formally ending 40 years of hostility.
1980 - Soviet Union Premier Alexei N. Kosygin resigned.
1983 - Two-hundred forty-one U.S. Marines and sailors in Lebanon were killed in a suicide truck-bombing at the Marine Operations Center. At the same time at another peacekeeping base, 58 French paratroopers were killed by a Lebanese suicide truck-bombing.
1987 - The U.S. Senate rejected the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork.
1995 - U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to a joint peacekeeping effort in Bosnia.
1996 - The civil trial of O.J. Simpson opened in Santa Monica, CA.
1998 - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat signed a land-for-peace West Bank agreement at the White House.
2002 - Armed Chechen men and women seized a crowded Moscow theater, taking hundreds hostage and threatening to kill them unless the Russian army pulled out of Chechnya.
Births 1835 - Adlai Ewing Stevenson, 23rd Vice President of the United States (1893-1897).
1869 - John William Heisman, the coach who revolutionized the game of college football, most memorably at Auburn, Georgia Tech, and Rice.
1906 - Gertrude Ederle, American Olympic swimming champion and first woman to swim the English Channel.
1925 - Johnny Carson, American TV host and comedian.
1935 - Chi-Chi Rodriguez, professional golfer.
1940 - Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento), Brazilian soccer star.
1942 - Michael Crichton, American writer.
1959 - Alfred Matthew Yankovic, best known as "Weird Al" Yankovic, American musical parodist.
Deaths 42 B.C.E. - Marcus Junius Brutus, conspirator in the assassination of Julius Caesar, a suicide.
1939 - Zane Grey, American writer of Western stories.
1950 - Al Jolson, American singer and blackface comedian of stage and film.
2003 - Madame Chiang Kai-shek, widow of the Chinese nationalist leader.
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