On December 9

On this day in ...
... 1961, the colonizing power, Britain, granted full independence to Tanganyika. Three years later the new country would merge with its island neighbor to the east, Zanzibar, to become the United Republic of Tanzania.
... 1966, Kirsten Gillibrand was born in Albany, New York. Following several years as a member of Congress, she became the junior Democratic Senator from New York on January 26 of this year, having been appointed by the state's governor to replace the incumbent, Hillary Clinton, who resigned to become Secretary of State.

(Prior December 9 posts are here and here.)

On February 25

On this day in ...
... 1896, the 1st edition of a bimonthly periodical entitled Le Féminisme Chrétien (Christian Feminism) , appeared in France. The journal aimed "to disseminate feminist ideas in Christian milieus and Christian ideas in feminist milieus." The publisher was Marie Maugeret (1844-1928), who founded the Société des féministes chrétiennes the same year. Soon after, claiming the mantle of patriotism, she would agitate against Alfred Dreyfus, a military officer of Jewish heritage who was condemned to solitary confinement at the Devil's Island penal colony after being wrongly convicted of espionage in a trial tainted by anti-Semitism. (credit for caricature from a different journal, depicting Dreyfus as a serpentine traitor)
... 1885, expanding its colonization efforts in East Africa, Germany "annexed" Tanganyika and Zanzibar, in the area now comprising the country at right, Tanzania. (map credit)
... 1944 (65 years ago today), U.S. Rep. Suzanna Kosmas (D-Fla.), elected to Congress last November, was born in Washington, D.C.

(Prior February 25 posts are here and here.)

On August 27

On this day in ...
... 1973 (35 years ago today), in Attorney General v. Lavell, a divided Canadian Supreme Court held that the Indian Act -- which stripped aboriginal women who married non-Indians of their Indian status but did not similarly deprive aboriginal men who married non-Indians -- was valid. The ruling, involving the cases of First Nations women Jeannette Corbière Lavell (right) and Yvonne Bédard, was reversed by legislation in 1985.
... 1896, the shortest war in history broke out and ended, in as few as 38 minutes. It was the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which pitted Britain, at that time engaged in trying to end the slave trade, against a nephew of the just-deceased leader of Zanzibar, an Indian Ocean archipelago now part of Tanzania. (map credit) Britain won, installed its preferred new leader, and, as recounted by the BBC's website:

As a final proof of their control over Zanzibar, the British demanded payment from the Zanzibar government to cover the cost of the shells fired on the country during the course of the war -- every last minute of it.

On August 7

On this day in ...

... 1998 (10 years ago today) , near-simultaneous explosions at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, took the lives of more than 200 people and injured another 4,000. In May 2001, a federal jury in New York convicted 4 men for their role in the bombing, which they were alleged to have taken in concert with Osama bin Laden. At a sentencing hearing today, members of a military commission jury at Guantánamo are listening to evidence about Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Bin Laden's driver, whom yesterday they convicted of material support for terrorism but acquitted of more serious charges of conspiracy. (credit for photo of Nairobi embassy after bombing)

... 1813 (195 years ago today), Paulina Kellogg was born in Bloomfield, New York. After her parents' death in 1820 she moved in with a religious aunt and herself became religious; her early career interest was squelched by the church's ban on single women missionaries. Her marriage to a merchant coincided with growing activism in "women’s rights, anti-slavery and temperance causes." Widowed in 1845, she "was left an independent and wealthy woman," who studied and lectured "on female physiology and anatomy, unprecedented in her time, which is said to have encouraged some of her listeners to join the first generation of women physicians." Paulina Wright Kellogg Davis (right), following her marriage in 1849 to a member of Congress from Rhode Island: organized the 1st 2 national women's rights conventions; ran "Una, the 1st feminist periodical that was owned, written, and edited entirely by women"; co-founded the New England Woman Suffrage Association; and published A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement (1871).