It was on this date, June 22, 1922, that fashion designer Bill Blass was born William Ralph Blass in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied fashion design at Parsons School of Design, then worked in counter-intelligence during World War Two. After the war, in 1945 Blass returned to New York and signed on with Anne Klein. […]

Read about churches and animal cruelty, religious discrimination and the “Sherbert Test,” Alphonse Laveran, José Rizal, Salman Rushdie, Catholic “toleration” in Maryland, Jean-Paul Sartre, Galileo recanting before the Inquisition and more …

It was on this date, June 22, 1887, that evolutionary biologist Julian Sorell Huxley was born in London. He was educated at Oxford and later taught there, distinguishing himself in biology and in many scientific and other writings, including editing his grandfather's Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (1935), an account of Thomas Henry […]

It was on this date, June 21, 1905, that French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris. Through his mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, Sartre was a great nephew of medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. He grew up fatherless and was reared by his grandfather, who called him Poulou. Working as a teacher from 1931 to 1945 […]

Rizal believed in peaceful reform – as well as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to a fair trial. He died an anti-clerical Catholic and was declared a national hero of the Philippines.

It was on this date, June 18, 1845, that French epidemiologist Alphonse Laveran was born Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran in Paris, the son of an army doctor. His first medical training was as an army doctor in the Franco-Prussian War. Laveran’s keen observations—after observing the parasites in a blood smear taken from a patient who […]

It was on this date, June 18, 1948, that the American Library Association adopted its “Library Bill of Rights,”* an affirmation that libraries are charged with providing the information and ideas necessary for an informed populace and a vibrant democracy. It has been amended twice since 1948 and its current version is still less than […]

It was on this date, June 17, 1963, that the U.S. Supreme Court decided 7-2 in Sherbert v. Verner (374 U.S. 398 (1963)), creating the “Sherbert Test,” and saying that adherents of minority faiths cannot be disadvantaged by government without a compelling interest in limiting free exercise of religion. When a textile mill worker was […]

It was on this date, June 17, 1943, that American singer-songwriter and producer Barry Manilow was born. Best known for such recordings as “Mandy,” “Can't Smile Without You,” “Could It Be Magic” (which samples Frédéric Chopin's Prelude in C Minor), “I Write the Songs” (which he didn’t write) and “Copacabana,” Manilow has sold more than […]

Read about peace activist Bertha von Suttner, the Treaty with Tripoli, the religion of Alexander Bain and Hugh Laurie, Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, the religion of William Butler Yeats, adding religion to the Pledge of Allegiance, condemning Martin Luther from a glass house, and more …