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Our Daily Bleed...


ALEX GRIGOROPOULOS
Fifteen-year-old Greek anarchist street-riot martyr, murdered by police.
ST. NICHOLAS' DAY: Nicholas became a Bishop when quite young. From this fact arose the old European tradition of Boy Bishops, who reigned from December 6 to 28, in a cold Burlesque of church officials.
1240 -- Mongols under Batu Khan occupy & destroy Kiev.
1478 -- Baldassare Castiglione lives. Italian humanist/diplomat/courtier, famous for his The Book of the Courtier (1528), which was translated into many languages & made Castiglione the arbiter of aristocratic manners during the Renaissance. Wrote also Italian & Latin poems, & letters illustrating political & literary history.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/castigli.htm
1631 -- First predicted transit of Venus (Kepler) is observed.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap991119.html
1670 -- Near miss: the Duke of Ormond is pulled from his coach & dragged unconscious toward Tyburn with the intention of hanging him.
Source: 'Calendar Riots'
1712 -- Richard Steele & Joseph Addison publish the last issue of The Spectator.
1717 -- Elizabeth Carter lives. English poet, classicist, writer & translator, & a member of the Bluestocking Circle. Emma Hamilton, called Carter "[as] I imagine, the most learned female who ever lived" — though Hamilton's guardian's son wrote that Carter was "a fine old Slut..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Carter
1788 -- Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard Harris Barham) lives. Novelist & humorous poet. A character of George MacDonald Fraser's novel Flashman's Lady, there is a pub near Canterbury cathedral named The Thomas Ingoldsby.
1797 -- Mme de Stael meets Napoleon, who takes an immediate dislike to her.
1810 -- México: Miguel Hidalgo issues a decree abolishing slavery.
http://web.archive.org...eduardo.galeano/memoria.del.fuego/18101206.htm
1811 -- England: Curfew is declared in Nottinghamshire to try to stop Luddites revolt; in response, 36 frames are destroyed in the next six days.
Source: 'Calendar Riots'
1865 -- US: 13th amendment ratified, abolishing slavery. Sorry, does not include wage slavery.
1869 -- US: Meeting of first national black labor group, the Colored National Labor Convention, in Washington, DC.
1872 -- Thomas Ala Edison records "Mary had a little lamb."(Eat yer hearts out Led Zeppelin!!)
First sound recording made.
1882 -- Anthony Trollope dies, 67, Hastings, Sussex.
1882 -- Outer Space: Atmosphere of Venus detected during transit.
1884 -- US: An aluminum capstone completes the Washington Monument, Washington, DC.[Details / context]
1886 -- Poet / tree-hugger Joyce Kilmer lives, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
1889 -- US: Great trial of the Chicago Haymarket anarchists begins.Again, national & international protest. When the Illinois Supreme Court rejects their appeal, George Bernard Shaw wrote (this is close to his exact words):
"If the world must lose eight of its people, it can better afford to lose the eight members of the Illinois Supreme Court."
http://graveyards.com/IL/Cook/foresthome/ne-haymarket.html
1889 -- Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Jefferson Davis, President of Confederate States of America (1861-5), dies.
1893 -- Sylvia Townsend Warner lives, England. Self-proclaimed "accidental" writer whose career began when she was given paper with a "particularly tempting surface" & whose first novel, Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman (1926), was written because she "happened to find very agreeable thin lined paper in a job lot."
1893 --
Strange: December Fortean Events "[Fall of a] lump of ice weighing four pounds, Texass (Scientific American, 68-58); The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, 1974. [p.185]."
http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm
1896 -- Songster Ira Gershwin lives.
1900 -- Actress Agnes Moorehead lives. Appeared in more than 70 films beginning with "Citizen Kane". Appeared in a movie shot near St. George, Utah — downwind from the Yucca Flat, Nevada nuclear test site. She was one of over 90 (of 220) cast & crew members who developed cancer(s).
1904 -- US: "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine asserts the American right to serve as international policemen anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Didna ask anyone else. To "projtect" US interests.
1906 --Brazil: First São Paulo State Congress, at Salão Excelsior, December 6- 8th.
[Details / context]
1907 -- US: 361 coal workers killed. In West Virginia's Marion County, an explosion at a mine owned by the Fairmont Coal Company in Monongah is the worst mining disaster in American history.
[Sources]
1909 -- Russia: Moishe Tokar, a young Russian Jewish anarchist & exiled member of Judith Goodman's group in London before slipping back into Russia, attempts to assassinate Hershelman, the hated military commander of the Vilna Fortress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moishe_Tokar
1912 -- US: Anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman scheduled to lecture on syndicalism in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
1914 -- México: The troops of Pancho Villa & the anarquista Emiliano Zapata enter México City.
http://web.archive.org...eduardo.galeano/memoria.del.fuego/19141206.htm
1917 -- Canada: The most devastating man-made explosion in the pre-nuclear age occurs as the S.S. Mont Blanc, a French munitions ship, explodes 20 minutes after colliding with a Belgian relief ship in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
1917 -- Finland: Independence declared from Russia (National Day).
1918 -- US: Department of War abolishes the practice of manacling defiant prisoners to the walls of their cells in solitary confinement, used to torture conscientious objectors (COs) in US prisons during World War I.
1920 --US: First issue of the fortnightly paper L'Agitazione, in Boston, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Comitato di Difesa Pro Sacco & Vanzetti (Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee). Edited by Aldino Felicani, the paper attained a circulation of 25 thousand copies, publishing until March 1925, then changing its title to La Protesta Humana, & appeared from June 1926 to April 1927.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/millay/hamilton.htm
[Sacco Vanzetti sources]
1921 -- Ireland: The Irish Free State, composing four-fifths of Ireland, is declared under an historic peace agreement. However, Eamon DeValera, the President of Ireland objected that his state remained part of the British Commonwealth. Not until 1949 did the Irish Free State sever all ties with Britain, as the Republic of Eire.
1922 -- William P. McGivern lives. American novelist, screenplay writer, who published over 20 novels covering the wide genre of thrillers — homicide detection, espionage, political corruption, the world of psychopath, & the crooked cop.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mcgivern.htm
1928 -- Colombia: "Ciénaga Slaughter". After having broken a mass strike in the banana region in November, National Army troops today fire on a peaceful rally of thousands of strikers, killing over a thousand workers, in Ciénaga, the capital of the Colombian banana-producing zone in the 1920s.
Source: http://www.alasbarricadas.org/ateneovirtual/index.php?title=6_de_diciembre
1933 -- US: Ban on James Joyce's Ulysses lifted. You may ask how a country so proud of its "freedom" could have banned a book to begin with. Then again you may not...
Alternate Daily Bleed Patron Saint, Dec 6, 2001JAMES JOYCE
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned-books.html
Prophet of quantum mechanics, creator of cosmic puns.
1933 -- US: Dorothy Day & others start the Catholic Worker newspaper, New York City."The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart — a revolution which has to start with each one of us."
— Dorothy Day http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida
1933 -- Germany: Kandinsky & Klee leave for France & Switzerland respectively; 60,000 other artists (authors, actors, painters, musicians) flee the wondrous Nazi regime between 1933-39.
1936 -- Spain: In Solidaridad Obrera Jaime Balius publishes an article entitled "Durruti's Testament" in which he claims "Durruti bluntly asserted that we anarchists require that the Revolution be totalitarian in character."
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/spain/sp001780/chap1.html
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/Durruti.htm
1937 --The IWA meets in extra-ordinary congress in Paris (December 6 -17) to examine the CNT’s struggle in Spain, especially the problematic entry of anarchists into leading positions within the government.
[Details / context]
1942 -- Austrian novelist Peter Handke lives. Handke speaks of "history as the great fairy tale of the world, of mankind."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Handke
1949 -- Blues legend Leadbelly dies, New York City. Influenced Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, Bob Dylan, Martin Mull, myriad others.HUDDIE LEDBETTER 1997-2003 PATRON SAINT
Founding father of socially-conscious American blues.The number one man on the number one gang on the number one farm in the state.
— Pete Seeger
Fascinating site, Leadbelly Web,
http://web.archive.org...cycad.com/cgi-bin/Leadbelly/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadbelly
http://www.leadbelly.org/
1955 -- James Koehnline, long-time (jubilee) gardener, lives, Columbus, Ohio. Collage artist par excellence, SaintMeister.James Koehnline produced the animated film, Dogs Shall Eat Their Masters (premiered by Chicago Surrealist Group during their International Exhibition at Gallery Black Swan in 1976). Student & friend of Harry Bouras. Member of the band "Burden of Friendship" & the North Shore Industrial League. Librarian, author of Gone to Croatan, collage art collected in the book Magpie Reveries. Cooked up the fabulouso Jubilee Saints Calendar, published yearly by Autonomedia. Pumped out 600+ fabulous bookmarks for Recollection Books.
1956 -- Cuba: Fidel Castro's revolution. A vast improvement over the American & Mafia version, but ultimately just one authoritarian government replacing another.Related interest, see Cuban Anarchism: the History of a Movement by Frank Fernandez (Tucson: See Sharp Press).
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/dolgoff/cubanrevolution/toc.html
1957 -- US: Got Viagra? The first American attempt to launch an artificial satellite, a sphere fully 6.4 inches in diameter, fails as the Vanguard rocket rises less than five feet before it topples over & explodes. Like many American males, except for the five feet & the exploding part.
1958 -- England: Forty-six enter Thor rocket site in order to prevent construction. North Pickenham, Norfolk.
1961 -- Frantz Fanon, 36, having completed Wretched of the Earth, dies, Washington, DC. The book appears in English in 1965.
Alternate Daily Bleed Patron Saint, 2002
Frantz Fanon
Radical psychiatrist & proponent of Third World revolution as response to colonial rule.
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http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/fanon.htm
1963 --![]()
"...a fake continuation of modern art..."
'Response to a questionnaire from the Center for Socio-experimental Art,' signed on behalf of the Situationist International by J.V Martin, J. Strijbosch, R. Vaneigem & R. Viénet
Also issued, On the Exclusion of Attila Kotányi, circular of the Situationist International, in Paris.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]
1965 -- Rose Pesotta dies. Dressmaker, anarchist & labor activist, the only woman on the General Executive Board of the International Ladies' Garment Workers (ILGWU) from 1933-1944, engaged in a 10-year fight to organize workers, running up against the opposition of the communist faction. Her face was lacerated during a strike in 1937 with a razor.
1965 --![]()
Address to the Revolutionaries of Algeria & All Countries
Reprinted as a brochure in French, German, Spanish, English & Arabic; reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10, Paris.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]
1966 -- US: Rally at Madison Square Garden. SANE & 36 supporting organizations, Floyd McKissick, I.F. Stone, Pete Seeger participate. Hundreds of balloons with peace doves released. Where are they now when we need them?
http://www.peteseeger.net/
1969 -- Rolling Stones play a free "thank you" concert for 300,000 fans at the Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California after they were denied use of Golden Gate Park. The hastily organized event rapidly falls into a disaster when four people die, including one who was stabbed by a Hell's Angel who was hired to act as a security guard. The murder is filmed & included in the film "Gimme Shelter" which premiers exactly one year later. Marked the end of the San Francisco Rock era.