Tom Wigley
Thomas W Lawson The World's Only Seven Masted Schooner
CC license page here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

I decided not to go with a picture of a monkey because that picture is of  History's only 7 masted schooner ever, lost this day 1907 and the largest known (??) pure sailing vessel as well and the only such vessel with 7 masts.  That is the "official" or western description of this ship, but the exact dimensions and rigging of Zheng He's largest ships is not known with any great precision.  

Today is also the anniversary of the end of the Toledo War, a war between Ohio and Michigan over the "Toledo Strip".  As I understand it, this was a small piece of land stolen from the Indians, and not a stage performance.

On this day in history:

1287 – The Zuiderzee sea wall in the Netherlands collapsed, killing over 50,000 people.

1650 – Anne Greene was hanged at Oxford Castle for infanticide, having concealed an illegitimate stillbirth. The following day she revived in the dissection room and was pardoned.  Fickle, these magistrates. 

1782 – The Montgolfier brothers first test flight of an unmanned hot air balloon. 

1812 – The French invasion of Russia ended. 

1836 – The Toledo War unofficially ended. That's Toledo, Ohio, not Spain.

1900 – Max Planck presented a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law.

1902 – The Commercial Pacific Cable Company laid the first Pacific telegraph cable, 

1907 – The Thomas W. Lawson, the largest ever ship without a heat engine, ran aground and foundered near the Hellweather's Reef within the Isles of Scilly 

1911 – Roald Amundsen's team became the first to reach the South Pole.

1918 – The first UK general election where women were permitted to vote occurred

1940 – Plutonium (specifically Pu-238) was first isolated at Berkeley, California.

1948 – Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann were granted a patent for their cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game. It involved shooting artillery at targets, naturally enough

1958 – The 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition became the first to reach the southern pole of inaccessibility.

1960 – UNESCO's Convention against Discrimination in Education was adopted.

1962 – NASA's Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to fly by Venus.

1963 – The dam containing the Baldwin Hills Reservoir, which was built across an active fault line by LADWP,  burst, killing five people and damaging hundreds of homes in Los Angeles, California.

1964 – The Supreme Court ruled in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States that Congress can use the Constitution's Commerce Clause to fight discrimination.

1971 – Over 200 of East Pakistan's intellectuals were executed by the Pakistan Army and its local allies. 

1985 – Wilma Mankiller took office as the first woman elected to serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.

1992 – A helicopter carrying evacuees from the besieged town of Tkvarcheli was shot down by Georgian forces resulting in at least 52 deaths, including 25 children, a compound war crime that proved that Abkhazia was justified in seceding. 

1994 – Construction begian on the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river.

2008 – Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, Iraq.

2012 – Twenty-eight people, including the gunman, were killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Born this day in:

For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

~~ Anne Conway

1546 – Tycho Brahe, astronomer and chemist
1631 – Anne Conway, philosopher and author
1640 – Aphra Behn, playwright and author
1789 – Maria Szymanowska,  composer and pianist
1851 – Mary Tappan Wright, novelist and short story writer (
1866 – Roger Fry, painter and critic
1895 – Paul Éluard, poet and author
1896 – Jimmy Doolittle, general and pilot who had an amazing life
1897 – Margaret Chase Smith, educator and politician
1899 – DeFord Bailey, musician (
1902 – Herbert Feigl, philosopher from the Vienna Circle
1904 – Virginia Coffey, civil rights activist
1909 – Edward Lawrie Tatum, geneticist and academic
1911 – Spike Jones, singer and bandleader
1911 – Hans von Ohain, physicist and engineer (d. 1998)
1914 – Rosalyn Tureck, pianist and harpsichord player
1916 – Shirley Jackson, novelist and short story writer
1917 – June Taylor, dancer and choreographer
1920 – Clark Terry, trumpet player, composer, and educator
1922 – Nikolay Basov, physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1922 – Don Hewitt, journalist and producer, created 60 Minutes 
1927 – Richard Cassilly, tenor and actor
1930 – David R. Harris, geographer, anthropologist, and archaeologist
1932 – Charlie Rich,  singer, songwriter, and guitarist
1934 – Charlie Hodge, guitarist and singer
1941 – Ellen Willis,  journalist, critic, and academic
1942 – Dick Wagner, singer, songwriter, and guitarist
1943 – Emmett Tyrrell, journalist, author, and publisher,
1946 – Joyce Vincent Wilson, singer
1947 – Christopher Parkening, guitarist and educator
1949 – Cliff Williams, bass player
1953 – Wade Davis, anthropologist, author, and photographer
1955 – Jill Pipher,  mathematician and academic
1958 – Mike Scott, singer, songwriter, and guitarist
1958 – Spider Stacy, singer, songwriter, and guitarist
1966 – Tim Sköld, bass player and producer
1970 – Anna Maria Jopek, singer, songwriter, pianist, and producer
1970 – Beth Orton,  singer, songwriter and guitarist
1975 – Justin Furstenfeld, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1979 – Sophie Monk, singer, songwriter, and actress
1983 – Leanne Mitchell,  singer and songwriter
1985 – Alex Pennie, keyboard player

Died this day in:

The highest and most lofty trees have the most reason to dread the thunder.

~~ Charles Rollin

1417 – John Oldcastle, English Lollard leader burned as a heretic
1460 – Guarino da Verona, Italian scholar and translator
1480 – Niccolò Perotti, humanist scholar
1651 – Pierre Dupuy, French historian and scholar
1741 – Charles Rollin, French historian and educator
1785 – Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Italian painter and engraver
1788 – Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, German pianist and composer
1838 – Jean-Olivier Chénier, Canadian physician
1842 – Ben Crack-O, king of several tribes around Cape Palmas who was treacherously assaulted and assassinated by Commodore Perry and his crew during what was supposed to be a peaceful palaver, a far too common fate of those foolish enough to meet with US military commanders under such conditions.
1865 – Johan Georg Forchhammer, geologist and mineralogist
1873 – Louis Agassiz, zoologist and geologist
1927 – Julian Sochocki, mathematician and academic
1935 – Stanley G. Weinbaum, author
1937 – Fabián de la Rosa, painter and educator
1953 – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,  author and academic
1963 – Dinah Washington, singer and pianist
1974 – Walter Lippmann, journalist and author
1978 – Salvador de Madariaga, historian and diplomat
1989 – Andrei Sakharov, physicist and activist
1996 – Gaston Miron, poet and author
1997 – Emily Cheney Neville, author
1997 – Kurt Winter, guitarist and songwriter
2001 – W. G. Sebald, novelist, essayist, and poet
2011 – Joe Simon, author and illustrator
2011 – Billie Jo Spears, singer-songwriter
2012 – Victoria Leigh Soto, educator
2013 – Janet Dailey, author
2013 – Dennis Lindley, statistician and academic
2014 – Theo Colborn, zoologist and academic
2017 – Yu Kwang-chung, writer

Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such:
Alabama Day (Alabama)
Forty-seven Ronin Remembrance Day (Sengaku-ji, Tokyo)
Monkey Day
Green Monday
Roast Chestnuts Day
Free Shipping Day

Music goes here, iirc, well, With apologies

It's an open thread, so do your thing