1606 -- Guy Fawkes, the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions, at Westminster in London, jumps to his death moments before his execution for treason. See the Daily Bleed's Guy Fawkes Gallery page,
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/sinners/FawkesGuy.htm
http://unseelie.org/fawkes/index.html



1627 -- Spain: The government goes bankrupt. & here you be thinking all governments were bankrupt...


1686 -- Norway:

Way Far Out Strange Stuff:

Fall of substance like charred paper, Norway & other parts of northern Europe [Kirkwood. Meteoric Astronomy, p66] http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm

1747 -- England: First clinic for venereal disease opens, London.


1750 -- England: The first university magazine, Student, begins publication, Oxford.


1804 -- Scotland: Lighting of the Beacons Festival: particularly commemorated at St. Boswells, Roxburghshire in Scotland due to a drinking party that did a runner from the Ancrum Bridge public house after spotting the false alarm (of hilltop fire signals) warning of a French invasion.
Source: [Calendar Riots]


1855 -- US: Makah & Quileut reservations created by Neah Bay Treaty on what is now Olympic Peninsula, in Washington state.


1865 -- US: House of Representatives, by a narrow margin, passes 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery; becomes part of the Constitution later this year.

1869 -- Naples: Italian section of the International founded, Bakuninist.

1871 -- US: Millions of birds fly over western Frisco, darken the sky.



1871 -- France: The revolutionary journalist Émile Digeon participates in the "comité de salut public" in Carcassonne. ANARCHISTE

... show details

"Je regarde comme nuisible à l'Humanité tous les individus qui aspirent à gouverner les autres sous une forme quelconque et surtout ceux qui causent la misère des travailleurs en accaparant les richesses que ces derniers produisent." (...)

• See "Emile Digeon & Socialism in the Narbonnais," by Christopher Guthrie, in the British journal French History, Winter 1998.
  
  http://fh.oxfordjournals.org/content/12/1/43.extract
  http://www.ephemanar.net/mars24.html

1872 -- Western pulp writer Zane Grey lives.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/zgrey.htm


1876 -- US: Federal government orders all Native Americans to move to reservations or be declared hostile.

"Maybe we should not have humored them when they asked to live on reservations. Maybe we should have said, No, come join us. Be citizens along with the rest of us."

— acting President Ronald Reagan during a trip to Moscow,
when an impudent student asks about US treatment of Native Americans

1887 -- Sweden: Andreas Fritzner, anti-militarist activist, lives.


1890 -- Switzerland:

Far Out Strange Stuff:

Fall of "incalculable numbers" of larvae, some black, some yellow, in a "great tempest" [L'Astronomie, 1890-313] http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm

1891 -- Henrik Ibsen play "Hedda Gabler" premiers, Munchen.


1891 -- Sir Arthur Sullivan opera "Ivanhoe" premiers, London.


1894 -- Italy: Luigi Molinari hastily sentenced by a military tribunal to 23 years in prison as the instigator of an insurrection earlier this month in Lunigiana.

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Molinari & other anarchichos armed themselves in support of Sicilian victims of the "State of Siege" (proclaimed at the beginning of January), which aimed to repress the revolts against increased flour prices. Following a popular protest movement, Molinari is amnestied on September 20, 1895.

[Details / context]

1895 -- US: José Marti & others leave New York city to try to liberate Spanish Cuba.



1897 -- Argentina: El Perseguido, an anarchist-communist labor periodical, ceases publication.

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In 1888 & '89 immigration into the Argentine Republic increased rapidly & unemployment & strikes made their appearance. Malatesta was active in Buenos Aires during this period.

[Details / context]

1899 -- Aristide Lapeyre (1899-1974) lives. Hairdresser, anarchiste, militant pacifiste & néo-Malthusian.

... show details

With his brothers, Laurent & Paul, Aristide Lapeyre a founder of the CGT-SR. A participant in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39, during WWII he helped many comrades escape the Gestapo, & himself was taken hostage by the Nazis. A provider for abortions, on June 19, 1973 he was sentenced to five years in prison following the accidental death of a patient.

1899 -- US: Prevented from delivering her lecture today, "Authority versus Liberty," Emma Goldman's comrades print & distribute 5,000 copies of a manifesto containing the text of the anarchist-feminist's barred speech. America, extol the virtues of Free Speech.



1901 -- Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" opens to mixed reception at the Moscow Art Theater in a production directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. Olga Knipper, Chekhov's wife, plays Masha.

Some wag once said that the only thing characters do in Chekhov plays is wait for the train from Moscow.

1905 -- American novelist/short story writer John O'Hara lives, Pottsville, Pennsylvania.


1905 -- US: Mythology: First auto to exceed 100 mph (161 kph), A G MacDonald, Daytona Beach.

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Questionable. Auto speed records are full of contradictions, depending on which sources you use. Best guess is this occurred July 21, 1904, & with a different driver.

— Bleedster Bob Braunwart, ChronologyMeister

[Louis Rigolly of France did 103.56 on 21 Jul 1904; at Daytona, Fred H Marriott hit 121.57 in his Stanley Steamer on 26 Jan 1905. — ed.]

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1909 -- US: Emma Goldman speaks to a crowd of over 2,000 people in San Francisco on "Why I Am an Anarchist."



1912 -- Australia: A General Strike begins in Brisbane, Qld. (until March 6). It follows the suspension of tramway workers for wearing union badges.


1912 -- US: The world's first full daily comics page appears, NY Evening Journal.


1914 -- Australia: IWW newspaper Direct Action first appears.
Source: A Brief History of the IWW outside the US (1905-1999) by Morgan Miller
http://www.iww.org/en/history/library/misc/FNBrill1999



1915 -- Thomas Merton lives, Prades, Pyrenees-Orientales, France. Radical pacifist US priest. The Seven Storey Mountain, describing his journey from Columbia University student days to his decision to become a Trappist monk, was a best seller.

Daily Bleed Patron Saint 2004-5
American mystic, contemplative, religious activist.

http://www.merton.org/

1915 -- First poison gas attack, Germans against Russians.



1915 --

Way Far Out Strange Stuff:

A "symbolic-looking formation," six or seven white spots arranged like the Greek letter Gamma, seen on the moon, in Littrow [Eng. Mec., 101-47] http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm

1915 -- Alan Lomax lives, Austin, Texass. Son of folklorist John Lomax.
Daily Bleed Patron Saint, 2007
American folk music preservationist,
figure of controversy in intellectual property rights
struggles for starving artists of the underclass.

1919 -- Scotland: Bloody Friday, The Red Clydeside, Glasgow — upwards of 60,000 demonstrators gathered in George Square in support of the strike; while a deputation was in the building meeting with Lord Provosts, police mounted a vicious & unprovoked attack on the demonstrators, felling unarmed men & women with their batons.

... show details

The demonstrators, with the ex-servicemen to the fore, quickly retaliated with fists, iron railings & broken bottles & forced the police into a retreat.

Fighting continued in & around the city centre streets for many hours afterwards. The Townhead area of the city & Glasgow Green, where many of the demonstrators had regrouped after the initial police charge, were the scenes of running battles between police & demonstrators. An estimated 10,000 English troops in total were sent to Glasgow in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of George Square. Monday February 10th the strike is called off.

http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/

1923 -- Novelist/socialist Norman Mailer lives, Long Branch, N.J. In 1973 he charged $50 a couple to attend his 50th-birthday celebration at New York's Four Seasons restaurant, the money to go toward establishing "a democratic secret police." 5,000 invitations sent, 500 attend.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/nmailer.htm

1924 -- George Simeonov Popov (1900-1924) dies, a suicide, to elude capture.

... show details

George Popov was a Bulgarian teacher, poet, speaker & anarchist organizer.

Popov initiated an insurrectionary movement against the coup d'etat of June 1923, which was quelled after a week of fighting against the army. Popov took refuge in the mountains, forming guerrilla anarchist groups. When his hiding place was discovered, he committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the army.

1927 -- "Drag", a homosexual comedy in three acts by Mae West, opens, Bridgeport.



1928 -- Scotch Tape is first sold. (The Smart Set prefer duct tape, God's Gift to Woman.)

1929 -- Erich Maria Remarque novel Im Westen nichts neues is published.


1929 -- William Faulkner novel Sartoris is published.


1930 -- Australia: Francis Chichester arrives in Sydney in his "Gypsy Moth" plane after a solo flight from London.


1933 --

"There's A New Day Comin' " Ted Lewis & His Band, 1/31/33

... show details Released six days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration on March 4, 1933, this peppy ode to full employment put on a bright face even as the banking system was collapsing. No matter: Ted Lewis, 'the top-hatted tragedian of jazz,' foresaw full employment for the brewer, & on March 13th the new President asked Congress to legalize beer. The repeal of Prohibition became official on December 5, 1933. Born Theodore Friedman in 1892, Ted Lewis blew a corny clarinet & billed himself "The Medicine Man of the Blues." His career spanned vaudeville to Vegas, & his slogan, "Is everybody happy?," never changed. Lewis aimed to please. — Mark Humphrey, "The Great Depression: American Music in the '30s" http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/mirror/Depressionmusic2.htm See also http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/music/artist/bio/0,,458704,00.html#bio

1935 -- Author Kenzaburo Oe (The Silent Cry; Personal Matter) lives, Ehime, Japan. His disconcerting picture of the current human predicament nets him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/oe.htm



1936 -- Several delegates from the Portuguese Anarchist Federation & from exile attend FAI meeting on 31 January & 1 February 1936.
... show details

It is, as I see it, very important for the historical record & for
ourselves that we call to mind these true stories that sometimes
have a tendency to slip from our memories.

— Edgar Rodrigues, Le Monde Libertaire no. 934, 25 Nov.- 1 Dec. 1993.

See also: We, The Anarchists, a study of the FAI, 1927-1931
by Stuart Christie, The Meltzer Press
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/07ref.htm#25/1927
http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/history/spain/
http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/6m90r5
http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/0gb5zh

1936 -- William Faulkner completes his novel Absalom, Absalom!.


1936 -- "The Green Hornet" premiers on WXYZ radio, Detroit (-1952).


1936 -- Spain: Plemum of the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) convenes in Madrid (January 31-February 1). Members of the FARP-FAI are also in attendance.

[Details / context]

1937 -- England: Emma Goldman lectures on Spain in Plymouth.




1940 -- US: Another 'Rags to Riches' Story? First social security check issued, $22.54, to Ida Fuller, Brattlesboro, Vermont.

Proves there are commies under every American bed.

http://www.ssa.gov/history/chrono.html



1941 -- Netherlands: An anti-German demonstration is held in Haarlem.


1943 -- US: 28 elderly invalids burn to death as fire sweeps through an old-age sanitarium near Seattle, Washington.



1945 -- US: Army Private Eddie Slovick shot for desertion.



1948 -- J.D. Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" appears in The New Yorker.
http://204.232.203.158/letters/index.php


1949 -- "A Book at Bedtime" premiers on BBC radio.



1950 -- US: Respected & Beloved Comrade Leader Truman orders construction of the first hydrogen bomb. Cold War years have American government fearing Russia will develop one, & US doesn't want to be left out.



1952 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Harry Truman denounces Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy as pathological, untruthful & a character assassin.


1956 -- John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) lives.


1959 -- Songster Buddy Holly plays Duluth, Minnesota. Bob Dylan is in the audience.


1961 -- Dick Higgins opera "The Peaceable Kingdom" & also "Amazing Grace" premier, Cooper Union, NYC.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/03ref.htm#15/1938


1963 -- US: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara declares:

"The war in Vietnam is going well & will succeed."

1966 -- Vietnam: US planes resume bombing of North Vietnam after a 37-day pause.


1966 -- Belgium: State police kill two striking mine workers.


1967 -- Norman Mailer's play "The Deer Park" opens, NY (-May 21).



1968 -- Vietnam: Tet Offensive catches South Vietnam off guard as war escalates.

70,000 Viet Cong troops attack 100 cities. Puts the lie to numerous US government & military & media masturabatory fantasies of American victory being "in hand."

... show details

At half-past midnight on Wednesday morning the North Vietnamese launch the Tet offensive at Nha Trang. Nearly 70,000 North Vietnamese troops take part in this broad action, taking the battle from the jungles to the cities. The offensive carried on for weeks & is seen as a major turning point for the American attitude toward the war. At 2:45 that morning the US embassy in Saigon is invaded & held until 9:15am.

On 1 January Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader General Westmoreland said: "Our forces have been able to detect impending major offensives & to mount spoiling attacks." Today, Westmoreland & his troops are caught completely by surprise. The fighting lasts until February 24, & undermines US morale abroad & at home. A photo of a police chief shooting a Viet Cong captive in the head is like a swan song.

American Perspective
Vietnamese Perspective
South Viet Nam government officialized history: In Memory of Tet 1968 by Phu Si (pdf)

We poured gasoline into the sawed off fifty-five gallon drums of shit; it mixed with the piss that was covering the shit. We then lit long sections of toilet paper & dropped them into the barrels, hoping for success. — David Willson, REMF (Rear Echelon Mother Fucker)

The Vietcong strike at Saigon, penetrate the US embassy compound, besiege a Marine base at Khe Sanh, & capture the provincial capital of Hue, among other initial gains. By the end of February, US & South Vietnamese forces repulse the offensive & inflict heavy losses on the Vietcong, but the episode exposes the reality that, contrary to US military claims, an end to the war is not in sight.

---

I have this beginning the day before. Probably just an International Dateline thing … could also just be a question of how the beginning of the offensive was defined.

— Bleedster Bob

---

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Narrative/Willson_Burning_Shit.html

1968 -- US: A Seattle (Washington) City Council hearing concludes that there are no legal means to curb hippies in the U-District.

http://seattletimes.com/special/centennial/october/outrage.html

1970 -- Bluesman Slim Harpo harps no more.
http://www.roadhouseblues.com/
http://www.bluesharp.ca/legends/sharpo.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Harpo

1970 -- Grateful Dead members are busted on LSD charges.


1971 -- US: Cold Day in Hell? The Winter Soldier Hearings begin in a Howard Johnson's motel in Detroit. Sponsored by the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the hearings are an attempt by soldiers who have served in Vietnam to publicize US conduct in the war.

"The war in Vietnam is going well & will succeed."

... show details

The veterans testify that the My Lai massacre was not an isolated incident & that American troops have committed atrocities. More than 100 veterans, in fact, testify to brutal US acts. Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield will enter the Winter Soldier hearings into the Congressional Record but, otherwise, the proceedings capture little attention.

1972 -- US: 40,000 mourners file past Mahalia Jackson's open coffin in Chicago's Great Salem Baptist Church.


1972 -- Rick Sylvester is crazy as a loon: skis off a 3,200 foot cliff strapped to a parachute. Don't know what happened.


1972 -- Ireland: The IRA calls a general strike, the day after Bloody Sunday.


1973 -- Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Senator John Stennis is shot twice during a robbery in Washington DC.


1979 -- The Clash begin their first North American tour, Vancouver, BC. Bo Diddley is their opening act.



1980 -- France: Siege of Plogoff. During the entire six weeks, from January 31 to March 14, the "city hall annexes" & the police guarding them come under constant attack from local people opposed to government plans to construct a nuclear plant

http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/499-500/4934.html

1980 -- Guatemala: Elias Barahona, official spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, reveals the President, General Romeo Lucas García, ordered police to set fire to the Spanish embassy with its occupants inside.

... show details

39 people are roasted alive, including 27 Indians peacefully occupying the embassy to denounce massacres in the Quiche region. Barahona also states that Lucas García commands the paramilitary & parapolice bands known as the Squadrons of Death, & helps draw up lists of opponents to disappear. He claims a "Program of pacification" being carried out is based on a 420 page document drawn up by specialists in the US based on their experience in the Vietnam War. In the first half of this year 27 university professors, 13 journalists, & 70 campesino leaders, mainly Indians, have been murdered. The repression has special intensity for Indian communities in the Quiche region, where large oil deposits have recently been discovered. http://web.archive.org/...eduardo.galeano/memoria.del.fuego/19800131.htm

EDUARDO GALEANO, Century of the Wind, p255


1980 -- Italy: In Milano, the state police mistakely kill the housewife Anna Maria Minci.
Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]



1981 -- West German squatters protest eviction attempts, battle the police in West Berlin. The fight rages into & through the 90s.

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/1003b.htm#1990
http://www.notbored.org/squatworld.html
http://www.drooker.com/

1981 -- Funeral scene is shot in Attenborough's film "Gandhi", with 300,000 extras.


1983 -- "Has anyone stopped to consider that the best way to balance the federal budget is not by taxing people into the poorhouse & it's not by cutting spending to the bone, but by all of us simply trying to live up to the Ten commandments & the Golden Rule?"

— Bad acting President Ronald Reagan to a convention of religious broadcasters


1987 -- US: Sleepless in Chicago? The longest movie ever made, 85-hour "The Cure for Insomnia", premiers, Chicago (-Feb. 3).


1990 -- Highest price paid for an atlas, $1,925,000, Ptolemy Cosmographia.


1992 -- US: Post office issues a 29-cent W.E.B. du Bois stamp — the first Communist on an American stamp.


1994 -- Somalia: US troops fire on Somalis waiting for food, killing five.


1995 -- Nederlands: Dutch evacuate 210,000 during the worst European floods this century.


1995 -- Colombia: Government admits police, judges & soldiers abetted the murder of 107 alleged left-wingers between 1988 & 1991.



1996 -- Chip Shot?: US Customs officials near San Diego attack Pastors for Peace activists attempting to carry donated computers across border to México for humanitarian shipment to Cuba.




1996 -- Sri Lanka: 80 killed by a massive Tamil Tiger terrorist truck bombing, Colombo.



1997 -- US: Four "Critical Mass" protesters arrested & five police officers "injured" when police attack a peaceful bicycle protest in downtown Seattle, Washington.

Critical Mass, started in Frisco in 1992, has spread to other cities since, & claims to have no leaders.

http://critical-mass.info/
http://www.oz.net/~nic/cmold.html

2001 -- Canadian book retailer Chapters accepts a takeover bid by rival Indigo.


2003 -- British PM Blair meets with George Dubya Bush to plan war against Iraq. Blair's stunning admission in 2009 to the BBC that he would have invaded Iraq regardless of whether there had been Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) reveals the true nature of the US-UK military escapade in the Middle East.
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-cohen/tony-blair-must-be-charge_b_391235.html
http://www.salon.com/2005/05/06/bush_blair_iraq/


2007 -- US: American satirist, political humorist, "Chief of Stuff," Molly Ivins dies, Austin, Texass. Co-editor of the Texass Observer, "the oldest permanently established floating craps game in the state."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0131-08.htm
http://www.creators.com/opinion/molly-ivins.html


2009 -- Iraq: Shoe sculpture in Tikrit, honoring the journalist (currently being held & tortured in an Iraq prison) who threw his footwear at Beloved & Respected Lord of MisRule George Dubya Bush, is wrongfully dismantled.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7862180.stm
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/


2011 -- Activist, teacher, historian, Don LaCoss, 46, dies unexpectedly. Contributing editor for the anti-authoritarian newspaper The Fifth Estate & an active member of the Chicago Surrealist Group.
http://lacrossetribune.com/lifestyles/announcements/obituaries/article_c69f3e2e-30ca-11e0-935b-001cc4c002e0.html
http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/13741
http://donsblog64.blogspot.com/



3000 --

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"...semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie."

— Umberto Eco, "A Theory of Semiotics"

4001 --