June 16 - Fudge Day

Not only is June National Candy Month, today is Fudge Day! (It even inspired me to make brownies!)

While there are a wide variety of fudge flavours, initially chocolate was never one of them! Our modern-day fudge evolved from Scottish Tablet, a candy which originated in the late 17th century. Scottish Tablet had a much harder texture, and though the recipes are very similar, chocolate was never in the mix! (Craziness!)

Today is also Bloomsday, Family Awareness Day, Father's Day, Husband Caregiver Day, Isra Al Mi Raj, and Ladies' Day (Baseball).

Here are some interesting things that happened on this day in history:

- Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle prison in Scotland in 1567.
- Monseigneur de Laval arrived in Québec as Vicar-apostolic in New France in 1659. He became Bishop in 1674.

- Holland forbade orange clothes in 1784. (It's not the most flattering of colours, but come on!)
- Abraham Lincoln stated, "A house divided against itself cannot stand" in 1858.
- Prime Minister Arthur Meighen, who devised the closure rule and drafted the Conscription Bill, was born in Anderson, Ontario in 1874.

- Ski pioneer Herman Johannsen or "Chief Jackrabbit" (from his Cree name), patron of the Canadian Ski Marathon, was born in Horten, Norway in 1875.

- The Victoria Hall "theatre panic" in Sunderland, England in 1883 killed 183 children.
- In 1891, John Joseph Caldwell Abbott was chosen to succeed Macdonald as leader of the Conservatives, and became Prime Minister.

- The Pepsi Cola company formed in 1903.
- Ozias Leduc, whose paintings of daily life and nature have both a symbolic and spiritual dimension, died in St-Hyacinthe, Québec in 1955.

- Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, having been selected to pilot Vostok 6, beating out 400 other applicants.
- The Churchill Falls power project opened in 1972, the largest single-site hydro-electric project in the world.

- "Blues Brothers," premiered in 1980.
- "Ghostbusters II" premiered in 1989.
- A collapse of a stage at a Toronto Radiohead concert killed one person in 2012. Also in 2012, Coca-Cola began business in Myanmar for the first time in 60 years.

Check out what happened last week in science:

Stay tuned for our next, "On This Day in History"!