1527 -- Venice: Printing any book without prior governmental permission is banned.


1688 -- Mystic religious writer Emanuel Swedenbourg lives. Devoted the first half of his life to scientific investigations & then started to explore mystical experience. Among Swedenbourg's most popular books are Heaven & Hell & Earths in Universe.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sweden.htm


1728 -- John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opens. It was the longest running play in British theatrical history before the 20th century. Kurt Weill & Berthold Brecht adapted it as The Three-Penny Opera.



1737 -- True American revolutionist Thomas Paine lives, Thetford, England. Unlike the so-called "Founding Fathers", he dies in obscurity, still a revolutionary.

“Let them call me rebel & welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”

http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/commonsense/

1820 -- Britain's King George III dies.

Shelley in his sonnet "England in 1819," called him "an old, mad, blind, despised, & dying king."

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Poet-laureate Robert Southey penned a shamelessly adulatory elegy, "A Vision of Judgment," not only envisioning the King's triumphal entry into Glory but in the Preface condemned Lord Byron as the leader of what Southey deemed a "Satanic" school of poetry.

Byron retaliated in his masterpiece, "The Vision of Judgment," in which George's soul goes on trial at the Pearly Gates. Southey is the real & deserving butt of the satire.

1834 -- US: Chesapeake & Ohio Canal workers riot. Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Jackson sends troops, the first use of American troops to suppress a labor dispute. Posse Comitatus be damned.
http://www.strawberryfieldsinc.com/

1845 -- Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" first appears, in the New York Evening Mirror. It can be viewed as a comic masterpiece. Imagine a despondent man sitting on a cold December night, lamenting his lost Lenore. A bird trained to talk, or at least to say one word, comes in. Every question that the narrator asks can be answered tragically by that one word.

Collage by SaintMeister James Koehnline



1860 -- Anton Chekhov lives, Taganrog, Russia (Jan 17 Old Style). In 1904, the year he dies, his last play, The Cherry Orchard, opens at the Moscow Art Theater (his 44th birthday).

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"It is hard at first to believe a playwright who comes to us & says, "the schoolteacher & the two stenographers next door to where you live in Fort Dodge — these are the real archetypes."

But until we have learned this — & most of us will never learn it, however many Chekhov plays we see; not really, not deep in the bowels of compassion, but only as we learn things in books — we will never learn to approach life with the beginnings of wisdom: with that wisdom so characteristic of Sophocles."

— Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tsehov.htm

1860 --

Strange Stuff:

Body of apparent size of Mercury seen crossing the sun [Nature, 14-505] http://web.archive.org/...passarola.com/strange/janfort.html http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm

1862 -- British composer of tone poems Frederick Delius lives, Yorkshire. As a young man he worked for a while as an orange planter in Florida. He is one of the spiritual founders of the "cowflop" school of English impressionist music.
http://www.delius.org.uk/



1863 -- US: Quota? Col. P.E. Connor surprises Bannock & Shoshone Indians in camp on Bear River, Utah; Bear Hunter, leader of a Shoshone band, & 224 (or upward to 400) others massacred in four hours, village on Bear River near Great Salt Lick, U-Tah.

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The dead include 90 women & children. After the slaughter, some soldiers went through the Indian village raping women & using axes to bash in the heads of women & children who were already dying of wounds.

Of the six major Indian massacres in the Far West, from Bear River in 1863 to Wounded Knee in 1890, the Bear River Massacre resulted in the most victims.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/
http://www.onlineutah.com/bearrivermassacre.shtml

1880 -- Film comedian W.C. Fields (William Claude Dukenfield) lives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We also show him born on 4/9/1879.

"Taint a fit night out for man nor beast..."

1884 -- Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda?: After over 25 years in preparation, the first part of the massive Oxford English Dictionary is published, misleadingly titled ‘A-ANT’. It should, of course have been "an" ant.


1885 -- US: Congress rejects Central American canal treaty with Nicaragua.


1886 -- France: Romain Rolland (1866-1944), author & pacifist, lives. Won 1915 Nobel Prize.
http://www.almaz.com/nobel/literature/1915a.html


1886 -- First successful gasoline-driven car patented, Karl Benz, Karlsruhe.


1888 -- Edward Lear dies in San Remo, Italy, where he traveled to live with his celebrated cat "Foss."
http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/


1889 -- US: 6,000 railway workers strike for union & end of 18-hour day.


1895 -- Key West:

FREEDOM TRAVELS IN A CIGAR

He never sleeps, eats little. José Marti collects people & money, writes articles & letters, gives speeches, poetry readings, & lectures; discusses organizes, buys weapons. More than 20-years of exile have not been able to put out his light... ... show details The workshops are like labor universities. It is the tradition that someone reads books or articles while the others work in silence, & thus the tobacco workers daily receive ideas & news, & daily travel through the world & history & the wonderful regions of the imagination. Through the mouth of the "reader" the human word shoots out & penetrates the women who strip tobacco & the men who twist the leaves & shape cigars on thigh or table. By agreement with generals Maximo Gomez & Antonio Maceo, Marti gives the order to rise. The order travels from these Florida workshops & reaches Cuba concealed within a Havana cigar. In a short interview, Cuban anarquista Gustavo López talks about what went wrong in his homeland. "The Cuban Revolution started out as a libertarian revolution, as in Russia. Castro's own father was an anarchist, & there were many anarchists in his movement, some of whom took part on the famous assault on the fortress. Castro himself was a rebel & in close touch with the anarchists. But when he took power he didn't know what to do with it." — Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices http://web.archive.org/...patriagrande.net/cuba/jose.marti/index.html

1900 -- US: American Baseball League forms, consisting of Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, & Minneapolis.



1904 -- US: AlphaRalpha, first college "letterman's club" started... hmmmmmmmm...guess which letter we favor....



1905 -- US: Trunk murderess Winnie Ruth Judd, who shot two women friends & chopped the bodies up to transport them to Los Angeles by train in 1931 only to be tripped up by a nosy baggage clerk, lives, Oxford, Indiana. Sent to a mental hospital, from which she escapes at least six times. Probably looking for her baggage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie_Ruth_Judd


1905 -- Viña Delmar lives. American novelist, best known for Bad Girl, a good book according to Bleedster Robert Braunwart.

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So now she is not just obscure, but three kinds of obscure. That's quite an accomplishment, for someone who, once upon a time, was one of the symbols of her time....

"I never learned how Viña Delmar's Bad Girl came out, but the title more or less gave it away. The heroine had to decide whether to sleep with her fiancé before they got married, & I am sure that she did, or the novel would have been called Good Girl."

— Charles Willeford, I Was Looking For A Street (1988)

...I want a song that's satirical,
& putting the mere into miracle.
Sing me a song with social significance,
Or you can sing till you're blue,
It must be packed with social fact
Or I won't love you...

Sing me a song with social significance,
There's nothing else that will do.
It must be dense with common sense
Or I won't love you.

       — "Sing Me a Song with Social Significance" by Harold Rome (1937)
From the 1937 hit musical revue, "Pins & Needles," performed by rank & file members of the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union); "Pins & Needles" was Broadway's longest-running show until "Oklahoma."

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In London, Emma Goldman continues her efforts to expose the Bolsheviks as betrayers of the revolution & violators of civil liberties, a task made more difficult & more urgent by the return of a British trade union delegation that reports favorably on conditions in the Soviet Union.

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Militants in Germany were being arrested & killed by the Nazi's. Michael Delissen from Munchengladbach was beaten to death by the Gestapo in December 1936. Anton Rosinke from Dusseldorf was murdered in February 1937.

Arrests in 1937 brought the number of members of the outlawed FAUD (anarcho-syndicalist Free Union of German Workers) in Gestapo clutches to 89.

It took a year to build the case against them. These male & female comrades were charged with "preparing acts of high treason" & were brought before the courts in January & February of 1938.

The Duisburg lathe-operator, Emil Mahnert, according to the testimony of four other inmates, was hurled from two stories up by a police torturer. Ernst Holtznagel was dispatched to the notorious 999 punishment battalion, where he was killed.

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A Union Oil Company drill strikes a deposit of high-pressure natural gas five miles off the Santa Barbara coast.

Millions of gallons of "California crude" are sent spewing over the seaside. Tens of thousands of birds & whole populations of marine life are wiped out before the drilling hole is plugged up with cement, temporarily containing the flow (see also 12 February).

Vietnam War veteran & author of arguably the best book of fiction to emerge from that war, The Short-Timers. Founder of the the Cafe Cafard.

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Anti-Authoritarian / Anarchist Encyclopedia