1517 -- Hernandez de Cordova sails with three vessels from Cuba to the "islands" west of Cuba in search of Indian slaves for the mines. Got his butt kicked by the Mayas, dying of his wounds shortly after returning to Cuba.

"During Lent of 1517 Francisco Hernandez de Cordova sailed from Cuba with three ships to procure slaves for the mines... (others say he sailed to discover new lands). He landed on the Isla de las Mujeres, to which he gave this name because the idols he found ...."

— Excerpt from Yucatan, Before & After the Conquest, written in 1566 by Friar Diego de Landa.

I am coincidentally reading Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, & the Fall of Old Mexico, by Hugh Thomas, which has a chapter on Hernandez de Cordova's voyage.

HdC sailed to the "islands" west of Cuba (that is, Yucatan, but the Spaniards still hadn't figured out that there was a continent lurking nearby, & thought the lands they'd "discovered" were all islands off the coast of Asia). HdC & crew thus became the first Spaniards to purposefully reach the mainland of what is now México (others had hit it accidentally while lost).

Anyway, HdC ended up basically getting his butt kicked by the Mayas, retreating to Florida, & dying of his wounds shortly after returning to Cuba....

[...] they were in search of Indian slaves, as they had a nasty habit of killing all the natives on the Caribbean islands they overran (through a mixture of outright killing, disease, & because their cattle overran the natives' crops).

— Greg Barnes, http://eatthestate.org/04-13/Backtalk.htm

http://www.isla-mujeres.net/history.htm


1577 -- Robert Burton, essayist/philosopher (The Anatomy of Melancholy), lives, Lindley, Leicestershire.


1587 -- England: Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart) beheaded. Queen consort of France (1559-60). Her unwise marital & political actions provoked rebellion among the Scottish nobles, forcing her to flee to England, where she was beheaded as a Roman Catholic threat to the English throne.
’Scope’


1612 -- Samuel Butler, satirical poet, decrier of Puritans (Hudibras) baptized at Strensham, Worcestershire.


1802 -- US: Banjo clock patented by Simon Willard of Boston; apparently a very popular style of clock for a while.

The Willard brothers, Simon, Ephraim, Aaron, & Benjamin were known for building fine American clocks. Simon’s banjo clock was extremely popular & considered to be one of the most important artistic contributions to American horology. The Willards used all brass clockworks rather than the less expensive wood versions.

http://www.prestigeclockrepair.com/museum/hanging.htm

1805 -- France: Louis-Auguste Blanqui, French revolutionary (workers' leader), lives, Puget-Theniers, Alpes-Maritimes.

Autonomedia Calendar Saint 2005-2009
A chief architect of the doomed Paris Commune of 1871.

http://www.spunk.org/library/intro/sp000285.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Auguste_Blanqui
http://www.ephemanar.net/fevrier01.html

1809 -- US: Reds Defeated? Russians who built blockhouse on the Hoh River (Olympic Peninsula) taken captive by Hoh Indians, & are held as slaves for two years.


1819 -- John Ruskin, art critic, lives, London.


1828 -- Jules Verne, French science fiction writer, (Journey to the Center of the Earth) lives Nantes, France. Foresees the submarine, the aqualung, television, space travel, etc.

Discovery of a long-lost novel reveals that, from the start, the father of science fiction was gravely concerned with the dangers of technology.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/verne.htm
http://JV.Gilead.org.il/butcher/20TL/

1851 -- American feminist writer Kate Chopin lives, St. Louis, Missouri.

KATE CHOPIN
Daily Bleed Saint, 2002. Author of The Awakening,
19th-century American classic feminist novel.

http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/chopink.htm

1878 -- Austria-Hungary: Jewish theologist Martin Buber lives, Vienna. See Kenneth Rexroth essay, Bird in the Bush.

"For me, Buber’s I & Thou stood out from all the other readings. Martin Buber was a real man of wisdom, one of the few Western religious thinkers I can stomach. During one of our discussions a classmate pulled out a copy of Kenneth Rexroth’s Bird in the Bush & read some passages from his essay on Buber. I immediately borrowed it, devoured it, & was never quite the same again." — Ken Knabb, Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State

1885 -- US: The 'City of Tokio' arrives in Honolulu carrying the first 944 official migrants from Japan to Hawaii. This first contingent of emigrants is brought to Hawaii as contract laborers.
[Sources]


1886 -- England: "Black Monday": a meeting of 3-5000 unemployed workers in Trafalgar Square met by 600 police officers, ends in a (police?) riot. Demonstrations in Trafalgar Square banned.

Demos are banned in 1887 (8th & 18th Nov), by order of Charles Warren, commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis. See the book by Rodney Mace, Trafalgar Square, Emblem of Empire, (Lawrence & Wishart, 1976.)

— Bleedster Svejk, 12 Feb 2002
(who's often demonstrated in that square, which in reality is a glorified traffic roundabout)

http://www.met.police.uk/history/black_monday.htm

1887 -- US: Trust Me?: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Cleveland signs the Dawes Land Allotment Act, dissolving Indian tribes as legal entities. It distributes territory held in common by American Indian nations to individual families. Each family is to get 160 acres. All other land will be sold, with proceeds going to an educational trust fund.

The Dawes Land Allotment Act entitled each family on the Great Sioux Reservation to own 160 acres. Since the reservation contained twice the land needed for allotments, the law dispossessed the Sioux of half their rightful territory.

The Act ultimately results in the loss of tens of millions of acres of treaty land, driving a nail in the coffin of tribal culture. The congressional committee that proposed the law, in its great beneficence, had several goals (quote):

"The commune shall give way to the dignity & rights of American citizens . . . the heathen idols shall give place to the Christian altars, & . . . the tribal organization shall be broken up & the individuality of the Indian encouraged & developed, & the lands unnecessarily reserved for them opened to the pioneer [so that] intelligence & thrift may find lodging there."

http://www2.csusm.edu/nadp/asubject.htm
http://www2.csusm.edu/nadp/a1887.htm

1894 -- US: Enforcement Act repealed, making it easier for whites to disenfranchise blacks.


1906 -- Henry Roth (1906-) lives. American author who gained first international fame with his novel Call It Sleep (1934). Originally seen as an important proletarian novel of the 1930s, it was soon out of print & forgotten, but in the 1960s it was hailed as the finest Jewish-American novel of the first half of the century & one of the richest modernist novels to appear in America. Roth published no other novels until 1994, working several jobs, among others as a precision metal grinder, mental nurse, poultry farmer, & teacher.

Other forgotten writers from the 1930s who have been "rediscovered": Nathanael West, Daniel Fuchs, Edward Dahlberg, John Peale Bishop, Jack Conroy, Tess Slesinger, Nelson Algren, Meyer Levin, Albert Halper.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/henryr.htm
http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/r/henry_roth21.htm

1906 -- US: Chester F. Carlson, inventor of the photocopier, lives, Seattle, Washington.


1910 -- US: Boy Scouts of America chartered in Chicago by William D. Boyce. the Catholic Church gets little boys, so why not non-Catholics?

1910 -- Norway: Hans Henrik Jæger, (1854-1910), writer & anarchist, dies. alt: Hans Jaeger

"Your face holds all the love in the world. Moonlight steals across your face so full of Earthly beauty & Grief. For now Death extends her hands of Life & a band is made between the thousands of generations who are dead & the thousands of generations who are to come." — Edvard Munch Also, http://void.nothingness.org/archives/RA/display/1965 http://www.leksikon.org/html/dk/jeger_hans_henrik.htm

1911 -- Just Being Neighborly?: US helps overthrow Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Miguel Miguel Dávila in Honduras.
’Robert Braunwart’



1911 -- Poet Elizabeth Bishop lives, Worcester, Massachusetts; winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems, North & South, in 1956.


1912 -- US: IWW free speech fight; Vigilantes beat Industrial Workers of the World organizers for exercising free speech rights in San Diego, California. Some are tarred & feathered, forced to kiss the American flag & run out of town by the good citizens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_fights
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World
http://www.iww.org/


1916 -- Tristan Tzara finds DaDa in dictionary, Zurich, Switzerland.


1916 -- Eila Pennanen (1916-1994) One of the most significant female novelists in Finland after World War II. Also a critic, educator, translator, & essayist.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/eilap.htm


1917 -- US: Igal Roodenko, nonviolent activist, lives, New York. A regular contributor to "WIN" magazine.

The US Supreme Court rules that Negro passengers can not be forced to sit at the back of buses; in 1947, April 9-23, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsors an interstate bus ride (a Journey of Reconciliation) to test the ruling — Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko, & Joseph Felmet get arrested & serve 30 days on a chain gang. This is a particularly dangerous period in the US: lynchings in the south approach 1918 levels as Negro G.I.s return, talk of getting the rights they fought for. Roodenko was instrumental in abolishing the chain gang system when he wrote an expose of it for the New York Post. Through the years, Roodenko continued to protest racism & militarism (in 1963 he organized what turned out to be the first demonstration against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam) & was arrested at least 10 times for his stands, even being deported from Poland in 1987. Biographical piece on Roodenko at Swathmore Library, http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/DG151-175/dg161irood.htm http://www.nonviolence.org/ http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjor.htm

1919 -- US: General Strike in Butte, Montana, caused by dollar per day wage cut. To cope with disunity an interunion body is formed — The Workers & Soldiers Council — to conduct the strike.



1919 -- Spain: "La Canadienne" strike in Barcelona, taking its name from the principle electrical company involved, begins. Lasts 44 days, & extends to other companies, & becomes a General Strike — paralyzing the whole city & industry. The government declares martial law & imprisons 3,000 strikers of the anarcho-syndicalist C.N.T. [Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo].

[Details / context]

1921 -- Russia: The "Anarchist Prince," geographer, theorist, militant Peter Kropotkin dies.

Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Lenin offers a state funeral & burial in the Kremlin Wall — which is refused.

100,000 people attend Kropotkin's funeral procession on February 13 — organized by Alexandre Atabekian & others — & it is the last non-state-sponsored mass assembly in the Bolshevik Worker's Paradise for the next 70 years.

"All things for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men worked to produce them in the measure of their strength, & since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth... All is for all!"

"The two great movements of our century — towards Liberty of the individual & social co-operation of the whole community — are summed up in Anarchist-Communism."

I remember, said Emma, the cairn on the mountain ridge
a heap of broken stones & broken branches
with tokens attached of horsehair or rag
& the cry: "The waters before us
flow now to the Amur.
No mountains more to cross."

— excerpt from the poem, The Death of Kropotkin, by Herbert Read

1921 -- Russia: Emma Goldman arrives in Dmitrov shortly after Kropotkin's death.

On Feb. 13, Emma, among others, delivers a public remembrance at Kropotkin's funeral in Moscow. Soviet leaders release only a handful of anarchist political prisoners following an appeal to allow all incarcerated anarchists to attend the ceremony.

She & Alexander Berkman later decide to discontinue their work with the Petrograd Museum of the Revolution in order to accept an invitation to participate in the organizing committee of a museum honoring Kropotkin, independent of Soviet financing & oversight.

In mid-February Emma prepares articles about Kropotkin's death for the "Nation" & the "Manchester Guardian," & rejects an offer to write about Soviet Russia for the "New York World."

Within a month both she & Alex decide to leave Russia & alert the world to what they have witnessed & their disillusionment with the Bolshevik counter-revolution.

1926 -- US: Neal Cassady (The First Third) lives, Salt Lick City, Utah.

All Mormons seek to emulate him.

Pitcher of the Beat Team.

http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/ncassad6.html
http://lib.colostate.edu/research/english/beats.html

1926 -- Sean O'Casey's The Plough & the Stars first performance, the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. O'Casey was born in the working-class ghettos of Dublin that he made famousas a playwright. He was renowned for realistic dramas of the Dublin slums in war & revolution, in which tragedy & comedy are juxtaposed.


1931 -- American film cult hero James Dean lives.


1937 -- Spain: Malaga falls to Franco's forces.



1942 -- US: House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) recommends removing Japanese nationals from the Pacific Coast states for the duration of World War II, & interning them at least 500 miles inland in the Land of Freedom.

---

Note: One source says "Japanese-Americans," but I don't have any independent information.

— Bleedster Robert Braunwart, Chronologist

---

“There has always been a segment of American life, & a powerful segment, too, which equated virtue with mindlessness. In this connection, the House Un-American Activities Committee is one of the most sinister facts of our national life.” — James Baldwin, from, A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana (Marzani & Munsell, 1963)

1942 -- France: Lucien Barbedette (1890-1942) dies, Luxeuil-the-Baths. French professor & anarchist who wrote for many newspapers & reviews: "L'en Dehors," "La voix libertaire," "Terre libre," "Le semeur," "Le combat syndicaliste." He also participated in Sébastien Faure's Anarchist Encyclopedia.

"La violence appelle la violence; les révolutions sont les contre-parties fatales de l'oppression légalement organisée."

http://www.ephemanar.net/fevrier08.html


1944 -- ¶ During this month Beatser Jack Kerouac meets William S. Burroughs. Burroughs gives Kerouac a copy of Spengler's Decline of the West.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs



1951 -- Italy: During this month, in Turin, the first number of monthly magazine "Seme Anarchico" (Anarchist Seed) appears.

Italian journal of propaganda & social emancipation. With the help of Federazione Anarchica Italiana (FAI) & the efforts of Italo Garinei & Dante Armanetti, it publishes until March 1968. The title is taken up again in 1980.

http://www.ephemanar.net/fevrier08html

1954 -- ¶ Beatster Jack Kerouac, hitchiking from NY on the 27th of January, visits Neale & Carolyn Cassady in Los Gatos, California. Kerouac's interest in Buddhism begins as he reads Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible; he also begins writing "Some of the Dharma." In March Kerouac settles in San Francisco.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac


1962 -- South Vietnam: US Defense Department sets up the Military Defense Command to protect US from impending invasion of Alabama, Rhode Island & Nebraska by Vietnamese Reds.


1963 -- Iraq: Military coup in Iraq topples regime of Abdel Karim Kassem.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/iraq.html



1964 -- Max Firetag, publisher of "Louie Louie" as recorded by the Kingsmen for Wand Records, denies Indiana Governor Matthew Welsh's claim that the song is "pornographic" ("I know it's pornographic because it makes my ears tingle.") Firetag offers $1,000 to anyone who can find anything "suggestive" in the song's lyrics.



1965 -- South Vietnam: 'Operation Rolling Thunder' begins using jet bombers inside the country, along with saturation bombing of the North, for strikes against "VC" targets. In a few weeks the first American soldier will "officially" step foot on the country's "battlefield" & 3,500 Marines at Da Nang air base a couple days later.


1967 -- India: Indira Gandhi struck in face by rock thrown at rally.



1968 -- US: Orangeburg Massacre...South Carolina highway patrolmen fire on black SC State students, kill four & wound 33 as black students protest at a segregated bowling alley — the first student demonstrators killed by police in the '60s. Meanwhile, down in Alabama, Beloved & Respected Comrade Racist Governor George Wallace enters the presidential race as an Independent.
http://www.furman.edu/palmetto/college/1966on.htm
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/005.html



1968 -- US: Soul On Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver is published.



1969 -- Leopoldo Méndez (1902-1969) dies.

Méndez was a printmaker, painter &
muralist. Like Posada, he is known
primarily for his politically charged
prints depicting the horrors of war,
struggles of laborers & parodies
of capitalist greed & fascism. He
helped found the long-lived Taller
de Gráfica Popular (TGP) in 1937.

http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/1999/mendez/

1971 -- US: National Guard ends four days of black rioting in Wilmington, North Carolina.



1971 -- Laos: South Vietnamese Army, aided by US air support, launches an attack into the country.


1974 -- Try This At Home?: Fresh eggs dropped 600 feet without breaking. Inspires a fun game called "The Dozens," as mentioned in Emmet Grogan's autobiography, Ringolevio.
’No confirmed source ’


1982 -- US: Eddie Monroe is declared mayor of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, California.


1988 -- Withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan announced by USSR.


1988 -- Panel of international historians issues a report finding Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Austrian President Kurt Waldheim knew of war crimes committed by his WWII units, & that he concealed & misrepresented his service during the war. He later served as Secretary General of the United Nations.

---

I have the following for Feb. 1: A commission of 7 Austrian historians concludes Kurt Waldheim was not guilty of WW II war crimes, but knew of them & did not prevent them. Are there two different events here?

— Robert Braunwart

---

1990 -- Rocker Del Shannon dies of a self-inflicted gun shot wound. He was 50 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_Shannon


1994 -- Gutter Snipe?: Final date, on Whidbey Island (on Puget Sound), in Pete Dexter's novel The Paperboy. The action is, however, primarily in Florida: ‘Sheriff Thurmond Call was found on the highway, gutted like an alligator.’



1998 -- Bill Gates has his (free!) pie & eats it too. The ol' anarchist Pie Brigade, it delivers.

http://www.pieman.org/

1998 -- Novelist Halldor Laxness, 95, dies, Leikjalundur, at a nursing home northwest of Reykjavik, Iceland.

Celebrated for his fiction depicting the harsh living conditions of Iceland's lower classes, in historical novels weaving the traditions of sagas & mythology into nationalistic & social issues. Cited by the 1955 Nobel literature committee "for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland."

Laxness produced more than 60 works — novels, plays, essays, short stories, memoirs & travel books — varying markedly in style, but carrying the thread of his ironic humor & compassion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halld%C3%B3r_Laxness

1999 -- Portugal: Luísa Do Carmo Franco Elias Adão (b. 1914) dies. Nurse & an anarchist, life-long companion of Acácio Tomás de Aquino, a militant anarcho-trade unionist.
http://historiaeciencia.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/061632.html
http://www.ephemanar.net/novembre09.html#aquino
http://historiaeciencia.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/061632.html


2005 -- US: ARTerror? Austrian artist Robert Jelinek — founder of the artist's collective "Sabotage" — flies from Vienna to Cincinnati via Amsterdam & Detroit, carrying art & literature for the exhibition titled "Incorporated: a recent (incomplete) history of infiltrations, actions & propositions utilizing contemporary art" at the Contemporary Arts Center.

Between Detroit & Cincinnati, Homeland Security (Fine Arts department?) confiscate 33 passport-works by artist Heimo Zobernig, educational leaflets, & personal items from Jelinek’s belongings.

Officials justify seizing the art because it is "produced by an anarchy group called Sabotage which does not believe in international borders."

http://www.autonomedia.org/

2006 -- Spain: Ricardo Taddei, the Argentine policeman wanted for 161 cases of kidnapping & torturing "leftist" dissidents during Argentina's Dirty War, is arrested after 20-years, in Madrid.


3000 --

"To live outside the law, you must be honest."

— Bob Dylan

http://www.nodo50.org/insurgentes/

3000 --

People are treated like passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading being into having, the society of the spectacle has further transformed having into merely appearing.

The result is an appalling contrast between cultural poverty & economic wealth, between what is & what could be.

"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation," Vaneigem asks, "entails the risk of dying of boredom?"

[Situationist International Resources]