1851 -- US: Fire at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, destroys about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson's personal library, sold to the institution in 1815.

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Established in 1800 when Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President John Adams approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress." It is not clear why any of the volumes other than "Dumb & Dumber" are in there.

Today, the collection, housed in three enormous buildings in Washington, contains more than 17,000,000 books, as well as nearly 95,000,000 maps, manuscripts, photographs, films, audio & video recordings, prints & drawings, & other special collections.

Now if someone would only turn on the lights.

Embarking for his celebrated American lecture tour, Oscar Wilde boards the Arizona, whose captain later swears:

"I wish I had had that man lashed to the bowsprit on the windward side."

“If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to make an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.”

— Dorothy Parker

http://www.bibliomania.com/0/2/57/frameset.html
http://struggle.ws/ws98/ws53_wilde.html

http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/ppl/wri/wilde/

1881 -- Juan Ramón Jiménez lives. (or 1888?) Spanish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. Made his birthplace Moguer famous by his story of the young poet & his donkey, Platero & I (1914), one of the classics of modern Spanish literature.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jimenez.htm



1889 -- Bicycle with a back-pedal brake is patented. Considerable evidence suggesting the research was stolen is dismissed by back-pedaling politicians with a smug "Them be the brakes."




1894 -- Spain: Andreu Capdevila Puig lives (1894 -1987), Barcelona. Dye worker, militant in the CNT, the Spanish Revolution & in France, where he wrote for most of the exile papers (Terra Lliure, Le Combat syndicaliste, Umbral, etc.). Companion of Antonia Sanchez Garrido.
http://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?article631
http://www.veuobrera.org/01biogra/1biogr-c.htm

Daily Bleed Patron Saint 2002-04

Surrealist magician of the little wooden box.

IZZY STONE, Patron Saint 2007-2010
Hallmark independent American muckraking journalist.

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1913 -- Artist Ad Reinhardt lives, in the abstract monochrome continuum, especially black. For an in-depth page intricate in it's diversity, this overwhelming page is a must-see:
http://web.archive.org...Merchant2/graphics/00000001/bandanas/ban-black.gif
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/reinhardt_ad.html


1913 -- US: 72 miners' children killed in a false fire panic caused by "copper boss thug men" (company stooges) at Union Hall Christmas party, Calumet, Michigan.

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"The Italian Hall Disaster." Striking copper miners & their children are having a Christmas celebration; strike-breakers outside bar the doors then raise a false fire alarm. In the ensuing stampede, 73 (roughly half are children) are crushed or suffocated.

Bitter strikes at the time resulted as the miners, under the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners, demanded decent pay & safer working conditions.

Woody Guthrie's description (the song, The 1913 Massacre) of the events is dead-on accurate, according to the residents of Calumet; Italian Hall, where the disaster occurred, was still standing in the early 1980s, but has since been torn down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz7oguguIZE

1914 -- Wilderness advocate John Muir dies, Los Angeles, California.

Serafín Aliaga lives (1915-1990). Spanish anarquista, head of AJA (Alianza Juvenil Antifascista), delegate to the founding congress of Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL), eventually joined the Communist Party during exile in Mexico. http://www.dipualba.es/archivo/Presidentes/Seraf%C3%ADn%20Aliaga.htm ALIAGA LLEDÓ, Serafín; Presidente de la AJA: Serafín Aliaga La AJA (Alianza Juvenil Antifascista), delegate to the founding congress of Federación Ibérica de ruventudes Libertarias (FIJL). Apartir del 6 de febrero la Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias había inaugurado las tareas de su II Congreso. Desde la constitución, en 1932, de la FIJL, no había ésta celebrado un acto de tal magnitud. Su órgano en la prensa, Juventud Libre, apareció aquellos días cotidianamente. El acto tuvo lugar en el Teatro de la Né à Alicante le 24 décembre 1915 - mort à Madrid le 18 juin 1990 ALIAGA, Serafin FIJL - CNT puis PCE - Levant & Mexique C’est pendant la guerre qu’au travers de la Fédération Ibérique des Jeunesses libertaires (FIJL) où il défendait une ligne collaborationiste que Serafin Aliaga allait acquérir une certaine renomée et qu’il allait s’imposer dans le mouvement libertaire. En février 1937, au plenum national de la FIJL à Valence, au nom du Comité National de la CNT, il s’était violemment affronté à José Peirats Valls qui était opposé à la collaboration. En mai au congrès provincial de la FIJL d’Alicante, il s’était prononcé pour la formation d’une République fédéraliste. En juillet nommé vice secrétaire de la FIJL, il était (...) http://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?auteur2 Born in Alicante on December 24, 1915 - died in Madrid on June 18, 1990 ALIAGA, Serafin FIJL - CNT then PCE - Raising & México It is during the war which through the Iberian Federation of libertarian Youths (FIJL) where it defended a line collaborationist that Serafin Aliaga was going to acquire some renomée & that it was going to be essential in the libertarian movement. In February 1937, with the national plenum of the FIJL with Valence, in the name of the National Committee of the CNT, it had violently clashed in Jose Peirats Valls who was opposed to collaboration. In May with the provincial congress of the FIJL of Alicante, it had decided for the formation of a federalistic Republic. July appointed vice secretary of the FIJL...

Coming from exile England, from Cardiff, Wales, the anarchist Errico Malatesta slips clandestinely back into Tarente (southern Italy) & takes the train for Gènes, where an immense crowd greets his return. Malatesta was a wealthy man who put his entire fortune at the disposal of the cause. He won the militant support of broad sections of his countrymen whose demonstrations & strikes on his behalf saved him from death & imprisonment many times. His writing & speeches on anarchist organization influenced the shape of the anarchist movement. Kropotkin left us a picture of Malatesta's life in exile: "Without even so much as a room that he could call his own, he would sell sherbet in the streets of London to get his living, & in the evening write brilliant articles for the Italian papers. Imprisoned in France, released, expelled, re-condemned in Italy, confined to an island, escaped, & again in Italy in disguise; always in the hottest of the struggle...."

Through the systematic destruction of its finest radical leadership by big business & royalists, Italy eventually succumbed to fascism. Malatesta remained in Italy, under house arrest, until he died. Authorities ordered his body thrown into a common grave.

1919 -- US: Four men attempt to rob the payroll of the L.Q. White Shoe Company in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. One, later known as the “shotgun bandit,” fires at the moving payroll truck. They are unsuccessful & no one is hurt. The would-be bandits escape. Part of a series of robberies in the area, which includes the Braintree robbery for which the anarchists Sacco & Vanzetti are tried & executed.

We're the black cats & the terror of many to all oppressors we bring defeat!
They held true to their beliefs until the bitter end
Their pointless fucking execution was some kind of sick revenge!
Fuck You!

— Against All Authority
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX6xXSbO4UE
Sacco & Vanzetti Timeline
http://www.infoshop.org/Sacco-Vanzetti

[Details / context]

Il Libertario is a vital part of the Italian trade union movement & agitation at the beginning of the century, in the debates over WWI & the upheavals of 1919-1921, surviving repressive efforts by authorities until destroyed by the fascists in 1922.
[Details / context]

La Spezia, sortie du premier numéro de l'hebdomadaire anarchiste "Il Libertario" dirigé par Pasquale Binazzi et Petroni Carlotta Zelmira. Il subira à de nombreuses reprises la répression des autorités et sera même détruit le 29 octobre 1922 par les fascistes.



1933 -- In his diary Harold Nicolson describes his marriage to novelist/poet Vita Sackville-West: "Had I been a passionate man . . . we should now have separated, I living in Montevideo as H. M. Minister & she breeding Samoyeds in the Gobi desert."


1933 -- Henry Ford denies being an antisemite & states that he never gave financial aid to Hitler or the Nazis. The publisher of some 91 editions of the fraudulent The Protocol of the Elders of Zion, that littl ol' automaker & war-profiteer, fibs big time, yupadoodle.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0730.htm#HenryFord
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/timebase/1933tbse.htm


1936 -- US: Merry Xmas!! Gilbert Mers's Working the Waterfront describes as follows a 1936 Christmas Eve assault on strikers & supporters in Galveston, Texass, during a strike of longshoremen, sailors, & other maritime workers.

Lieutenant Murray & the waterfront detail put an abrupt end to yuletide that night. The officers started at the foot of 75th Street & worked inland, from bar to bar, smashing heads, furniture, whatever came within range of flailing nightsticks.

From an issue of the old Houston Press, no longer in publication: "Police beat 150 in raid on docks," a headline said. A subhead: "Acting Chief Honea goes to scene, restores order—after police use clubs, guns, fists." Ambulances rushed to the scene. "Twice police jerked men from ambulances & resumed beating them," continued the reporter.

There is more. A few days later in a follow-up story ambulance drivers & attendants complained to a city council meeting that their attempts to administer first aid to victims sorely needing it were interfered with by police, to the point that they were prevented from rendering such aid at the scene, forcing them to transport victims to hospital emergency rooms in worse shape than they need have been.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/octbg
http://www.iww.org/history/biography/GilbertMers/1

1936 -- US: Ho, ho ho!! On Christmas Eve 50 policemen beat the snot out of 150 strikers on the Houston docks in Texass.
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/TT/octbg.html


1942 -- Germany: Buzz-Off? First powered flight of V-1 buzz bomb, Peenemonde. Shooting one down, a British pilot gleefully reports: "I caught a buzz." While the Vatican helped Nazi's flee to South America following the war, Nazi research scientists are openly & warmly welcomed in the US. Other Nazi war criminals are secretly hired by the CIA, others aided in their efforts to flee justice.
http://www.barnonedrinks.com/drinks/b/buzz-bomb-1021.html
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Secret-CIA-files-released-on-Hitler-Nazi-bigwigs...1336



1946 -- Nederlands: Karl Max Kreuger lives (1946-1999), Amsterdam. Activist, anarchist, a founding member of the Vrije Bond (Free Union) after it split with the OVB (independent union), over it’s failure to involve itself in the broader social issues beyond the workplace.



1947 -- US: 63 Heart Mountain draft resistors, sentenced to jail on June 26th, are granted a pardon.
[Sources]


1948 -- US: First US house completely solar heated is occupied, Dover, Massachusetts.



1954 -- Johnny Ace, ballad singer, dies at 25 while playing Russian Roulette.

Lottery: A state tax upon those who are bad at mathematics.

1955 -- A Purple Xmas?: Aldous Huxley takes his first acid (LSD) trip. Ho, ho, ho!


1957 -- Norma Talmadge dies in her sleep in Las Vegas, aged 64 (or 60). Made at least 67 movies before retiring in 1930. Arthritis had confined her to a wheelchair for several years.


1960 -- King Me?: The Philadelphia Orphan's Court raises singer Chubby Checker's weekly allowance from $150 to $200. The 19-year old has already put three songs, "The Class," "The Twist" & "The Hucklebuck," in the pop Top 40.


1964 -- England: Trinidadian-born feminist, communist Claudia Jones dies, London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Jones


1965 -- Cuba: Prison uprising. The queers were the ones who started the riot that gray Sunday dawn of December 24, 1965. Let it be said that they showed more guts than many of us "men"...

"I aam with my peerioood..." "Me too..." "& me..." The "peerioood" epidemic spread through the camp like a prairie fire. http://www.blacklistedjournalist.com/column7.html

1965 --

Watts riots The Decline & Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Society, English language brochure by Guy Debord analyzing the Watts riots in Los Angeles; reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10, Paris. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]

1966 -- Vietnam: US cargo plane crashes near Da Nang, South Vietnam, killing 103 civilians on the ground.


1968 -- Korea: Crew of Pueblo released by North Korea after 11 months of captivity.


1968 -- Outer Space: Bad Moon Rising? Apollo 8 astronauts take photo of earth rising behind the moon.


1969 -- US: Manson 'Family' indictments. Family values indeed. Meanwhile a Rolling Stones free concert at end of its tour, is marred by the Altamont, California racetrack festival fiasco (300,000 attend; Meredith Hunter killed when Hell's Angels get ugly).


1971 -- Perúvian Airlines turboprop crashes near headwaters of the Amazon, killing all but one of 92 people on board. The sole survivor, a 17-year old West German girl, Juliana Margaret Koepecke, found after wandering dazed & injured through the jungle for nearly 10 days.



1973 -- Tom Johnson of the Doobie Brothers arrested in Visalia, California on charges of marijuana possession. He has to go to court January 10, right about the time the group's new album is released. The title? "What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits."
http://hempfest.org/


1975 -- France: Nicholas Lazarevitch (1895-1975) dies, Paris.

Nicholas Lazarevitch, son of Russian revolutionary émigrés, became an anarcho-syndicalist shortly before WWI. He went to Russia in February 1919, & was close to the Bolsheviks before they arrested him. Married to Ida Mett, he later helped gather the documentation forming the basis of her "expose," The Kronstadt Commune (1938).

May 1968 saw Lazarevitch taking part in the open assemblies at the Sorbonne.

1977 -- Italy: Anti-Christmas demonstration in San Remo.



1980 -- US: Americans remember Iran hostages by shining lights for 417 seconds. The horror inspires a book by Stephen King called The Shining. Khomeini sees the light, quakes in the wake of such powerful symbolism.


1985 -- England: Ante Up? Anti-police riots in Sheffield, Monmouth & Southampton.
Source: [Calendar Riots]


1988 -- Japanese novelist (Nobi) & translator of Stendhal, Shohei Ooka, dies in Tokyo.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/01ref.htm#23/1783


1990 -- Iraq: Gulf Peace Team sets up camp, Judayyidat Ar'ar. & doing just a dandy job under the big tent, thanks.


1991 -- Yugoslavia: Parents of reservists from Grocka protest at Army headquarters, Belgrade.



1991 -- New Slim Fast Program?: Walter Hudson 1,025lb man, dies at 46. Attendees say "it was a crate funeral."

http://www.virtualpetcemetery.org/pet/index.html

1992 -- US: A JailBird in Hand is Worth Two in the...? Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Bush pardons six people in the Iran-Contra case, among them former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger & Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser. Power has its prerogatives, & Law & Order prevails once again while many deserving political prisoners remain rotting behind bars. Known, in America, as "The Trickle Out Theory."

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The Iran-Contra affair first became public in late 1986, when members of the Law & Order Reagan administration, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), & the armed forces were revealed as illegally selling arms to Iran to help secure release of American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups, & to raise funds for the illicit support of the rightwing Contras to overthrow Nicaragua's government. Revelations about the Iran-Contra connection caused a stink in Congress, which in 1983 passed the Boland amendments prohibiting the Defense Department, CIA, or any other government agency from providing military aid to the Contras. 13 top White House, State Department, & intelligence officials were found guilty of charges ranging from perjury to conspiracy to defraud the US. While Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Reagan is heavily implicated, neither he nor Vice President George Bush is directly indicted in the subsequent criminal trials. Ollie North smiles smugly. See Kornbluh, Peter & Byrne, Malcolm (eds.), The Iran Contra Scandal: The Declassified History, (New Press, 1993)