It was indeed a glad & gracious time, & the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war & cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern & angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight & offended no more in that way...
... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love...
1771 -- Tobias Smollett dies at Leghorn, 50. Scottish physician/novelist wrote Humphrey Clinker.
1778 -- US: Federal government enters into first treaty it made with Native Americans.
1787 -- US: Constitution is ratified by two-thirds of the colonies & adopted.
1820 -- Author Émile Augier lives.
1820 -- Poet John Keats, 24, leaves for Italy, hoping the climate will improve his tuberculosis; he dies there six months later.
Source: [Robert Braunwart] [Hereafter noted with symbol: ]
1846 -- US: A mob of Regulators march into Nauvoo, Illinois & ransack the city & its temple, following an agreement yesterday by the Mormons to surrender the city & all arms to anti-Mormon "Regulators" in return for a pledge of safety & protection for its people & property.
A preacher ascends the temple tower & proclaims, "Peace, Peace, Peace to the inhabitants of the Earth, now the Mormons are driven." In 1848 an arsonist set fire to the temple & three years later a tornado destroys what remains.
See Michael Newton, Racial & Religious Violence in America: A Chronology. (Garland, 1991).
1858 -- US: All Indians, No Chiefs?: Colonel Wright dictates terms of surrender to Indians at Coeur d'Alene mission; 24 chiefs of Yakama, Cayuse, Wallawalla, Palouse & Spokane tribes are shot or hanged.
1859 -- US: Self-coronation of Emperor Norton I of America, in Frisco, California.
Curious Bookshop emails us eternally into debt in 2009:
Oi! !
"Whoever after due & proper warning shall be heard
to utter the abominable word "Frisco", which has no
linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a
High Misdemeanor, & shall pay into the Imperial Treasury
as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars."
— Emperor Norton I, 1872 edict
Joshua Norton, who lost his money in an attempt to corner the rice market, declares himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States & Protector of Mexico. Time has proven him the greatest American ruler in history...
At the peremptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, & now for the past nine years & ten months of San Francisco, California, declare & proclaim myself Emperor of these U.S., & in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested do hereby order & direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall of this city, on the 1st day of February next, then & there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, & thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home & abroad, in our stability & integrity.
— Norton I, Emperor of the United States, September 17, 1859
1862 -- US: In the bloodiest single day of fighting in the American Civil War, more than 23,000 men are killed, wounded, or missing in action at the Battle of Antietam in western Maryland.
1862 -- US: Allegheny Arsenal Explosion. Seventy-five workers, including 43 girls, are killed in the explosion, making it the worst industrial accident associated with the Civil War. http://www.laborheritage.org/
1864 -- US: Albert Theodore Schroeder lives (1864-1953), in a log house near Horicon, Wisconsin. He met & came to know the liberals, socialists, radicals & anarchists (whose civil liberties he worked to uphold), other defenders of civil liberties, & leading personalities in the field of psychology. http://www.lib.umich.edu/files/exhibits/ishill/schroedr.html
1868 -- Canada: HotTimeOnTheTown? Barkerville, BC burns to the ground after a miner tries to kiss a dance-hall girl (their struggle dislodges a stovepipe).
1883 -- William Carlos Williams lives, Rutherford, New Jersey. Poet/physician. "I don't play golf, am not a joiner. I vote Democratic, read as much as my eyes will stand, & work at my trade day in & day out. When I can find nothing better to do, I write."
In 1951 his Autobiography is published on his 68th birthday. Important influence on Beat writers, especially Allen Ginsberg.
1887 -- France: "La Révolte" first appears. Jean Grave, director of "Le Révolte" in Switzerland since 1883, moved the paper to Paris & changed the name slightly to avoid possible legal prosecution. Published 326 numbers until forced to shut down under state repression ("lois scélérates") in 1894. http://www.ephemanar.net/septembre17.html#larevolte Graphic courtesy of Ephéméride Anarchiste
1888 -- Italy: Silvia Pisacane (1852-1888) dies, in Naples. Daughter of the revolutionary Carlo Pisacane, Silvia was involved with the Matese anarchist insurrection in 1877. Giovanni Bovio writes: "lì sospiro ultimo della tronca giovinezza mandai a Sapri. Fui Silvia Pisacane." 1877 Silvia Pisacane interviene presso Nicotera, divenuto Ministro degli Interni, a favore di un gruppo di anarchici del Matese.
1888. il 17 settembre, a nemmeno trentasei anni, Silvia muore a Napoli. Giovanni Bovio scrive sulla sua lapide
1890 -- US: United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) miners union issues a strike call to its 9,000 members. Within one week, 125,000 hard-coal coal miners are off their jobs & 96% of coal mine production ceases.
1892 -- Argentina: US marines land in Buenos Aires during a revolution (-Apr. 1893).
1897 -- US: Portland editor A. J. Pope arrested & jailed for sending "obscene" material in the anarchist "Firebrand" through the mail. Abe Isaak & Henry Addis, the other "Firebrand" editors, are arrested within the next few days on the same charge. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~jmmoran/research.htm
1900 -- US: Ton of Trouble? 100,000 Pennsylvania anthracite coal miners go on strike.
After the Molly Maguire trials in 1876, unionism disappeared from the state's 500 square miles of hard-coal fields.
English-speaking workers were replaced by workers from 20 different nations. Suspicious of each other, they appeared almost impossible to organize. But led by Johnny Mitchell in 1898, the United Mine Workers quietly began a campaign. The miners' average annual wage is $250 a year.
They are paid by the ton, which Pennsylvania defines as 2,400 pounds but which mine operators have increased to as much as 4,000 pounds.
"But those who have no pennies
O what do they do — pray
Lie down & get themselves buried
While the world goes on it's way
Oh no! For we'd have no pounds then
If they were allowed to do that
For without their toiling & moiling
We'd none of us grow fat"
— Bertolt Brecht, nursery rhyme from Three Penny Opera,
translated by Christopher Isherwood
1901 -- US: Twenty-five anarchists & their families terrorized & run out of town by some of the fine outstanding citizen patriots near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Thirty armed men, imitating the Ku Klux Klan, raided anarchist homes in Guffey Hollow in the dark of night, surrounding their houses & terrorizing the families by firing Winchesters, & revolvers & "yelling like Indians."
During a lull in the fusillade "the foreigners" agreed to leave with their wives, children & all their belongings before daybreak....before the sun rose every house in the settlement was deserted.
1908 -- John Creasey lives. Prolific English writer, who published some 600 mystery novels under 28 pseudonyms. A main force behind the founding of the British Crime Writers Association. Won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1962.
Whodunit?: Pseudonyms: Gordon Ashe, M.E.Cooce, Margaret Cooce, Henry St. John Cooper, Norman Deane, Elise Fecamps, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J.J. Marric, James Marsden, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton, Ken Ranger, William K. Reilly, Tex Riley, Jeremy York.
See: John Creasey — Fact or Fiction? A Candid Commentary in Third Person, With a Bibliography by John Creasey & Robert E. Briney, 1968; Creasey: Master of Mystery, 1972.
1908 -- First airplane fatality. During a demonstration at Arlington Heights, Virginia, a propeller blade comes loose on a plane piloted by Orville Wright, plunging the aircraft 150 feet to the ground. Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge of the US Signal Corps, a passenger, dies of a skull fracture, while Orville suffers serious injuries.
1911 -- First US transcontinental airplane flight (with numerous stops) begins as C.P. Rodgers leaves NY. He arrives in Pasadena, California on 5 November.
1916 -- Mary Stewart, novelist, lives, Sunderland, County Durham.
1916 -- Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford] writes his poem "Clair de Lune."
1921 -- Russia: Ten anarchists released from prison & deported: Voline, Vorobiov, Mark Mratchny, Michailov, Gregori Maximoff, Ioudine, Iartchouk, Gorelik, Feldman & Fedorov.
Fanya Baron & the poet Lev Chernyi are detained, to be executed. Fanya's execution is personally ordered by Lenin himself.
1922 -- Puerto Rican Nationalist Party is founded.
In the case of Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 U.S. 308, the US Supreme Court declares that Puerto Rico is a territory rather than a part of the Union. The decision claims the US constitution does not apply in Puerto Rico.
1928 -- Hurricane hits Lake Okeechobee, Florida drowning 1,800-2500.
1934 -- First 33 1/3 rpm recording released (Beethoven's 5th).
"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."
— Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
1934 -- Vivien Eliot, no longer wanting to be separated from her husband, sent an ad to the London Times:
"Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned Sept. 17, 1932."
Source: A Literary Companion, 1997.
1934 -- US: Today Southern employers meeting in Greenville, North Carolina, ready their big counter-offensive break the textile labor strikes & agitation which have occurred along the Eastern seaboard.
An army of 10,000 National Guardsmen was mobilized in Georgia & the Carolinas, Alabama, & Mississippi, supplemented by 15,000 armed deputies.
This week's efforts to stampede strikers back to work fails miserably, however, as tomorrow the AP reports 421,000 on strike — 20,000 than last week.
1934 -- US: White night riders threaten Filipinos, Turlock, California.
1935 -- Hippie bus driver, psychedelician, author Ken Kesey lives.
Wrote One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a vehicle for his anarchist rant
against the oppressive conformism imposed by society’s institutions.
http://wild-bohemian.com/kesey.htm http://www.intrepidtrips.com/
"You are either
on the bus or you're not on the bus."
At a Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, Kesey was paid volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs & reporting their effects. His experiences as an aide at a psychiatric hospital & LSD sessions served as background for One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest, which was set in a mental hospital. The book reveals the dehumanising effects of the social conformity of the 1950s, & gained huge critical & commercial success.
Kesey formed the 'Merrie Pranksters', bought an old school bus, & toured America & Mexico with his friends. Their weird exploits were later chronicled in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1973).
1938 -- US: Washington State CIO labor forms.
1938 -- Jean Anouilh play "Le bal des voleurs" premiers, Paris.
1939 -- American aviation hero & Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh makes his first anti-intervention radio speech. The US non-intervention movement was a huge mixed bag. Supported by former presidents Herbert Hoover, Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., Henry Ford (like Lindbergh, a Nazi admirer), Anne Morrow Lindbergh (a more rabid pro-Nazi than hubby Charles) & a number of senators & congressmen as well. http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/Timeline.html
1939 -- Poland: Soviet troops invade, jointly occupying it with German Nazis. This completes the terms of the non-aggression pact signed between Hitler/Stalin on August 23rd. Poland will not be free of Soviet domination for another 60 years.
"Springtime for Hitler & Germany,
Winter for Poland & France.
Deutchland is on the rise again,
Bombs are dropping from the skies again."
— Mel Brooks, The Producer
1943 -- US: Ammunition at the Naval Air station in Norfolk, Virginia explodes, killing 24 & injuring 250. This is the second major military disaster in Norfolk in 1943.
1951 -- Here's A Blurb?: Gelett Burgess dies in Carmel, California. Popular author of whimsical quatrains, credited with adding several new words to the English language, including blurb.
1953 -- US: Separation Anxiety? Carolyn Anne & Catherine Anne Mouton, born connected at the waist in July, become the first Siamese twins to be successfully separated by surgery. New Orleans, Louisiana.
1955 -- The shortest single ever released, Les Paul's "Magic Melody, Part 2" is released by Capitol Records; it consists of 2 notes.
[How many note(s) are in Part 1? —ed.]
1960 -- Panama: Mobs attack the US embassy in a dispute over the flying of the US & Panamanian flags.
1961 -- Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Dag Hammarskjold, UN Secretary General, dies in an air crash over the Congo.
1963 -- US: Train strikes a makeshift bus full of migrant workers, killing 32.
1967 -- The Doors perform "Light My Fire" & "People are Strange" on the "Ed Sullivan Show." Prior to the show, Sullivan asked Jim Morrison to change or omit the line "Girl, we couldn't get much higher" in "Light My Fire." Morrison sang it anyway. http://www.doors.com/
1967 -- The Who perform on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. In a famous incident documented on "The Kids Are Alright," Keith Moon sets a flash explosion in his drum kit, not realizing the crew had already done so. At the end of "My Generation" when the explosion goes off, it is so loud that it damages Pete Townshend's ears. http://www.notbored.org/townsend.html
1967 -- Little Richard with an all-soul revue opens at the Straight Theatre in Frisco, California.
1968 -- Auntie Dave,
Sometime Richard Nixon appeared on "Laugh-In" to say "Sock it to me"
— Bleedster Scott W. Langill, 2009
1970 -- England: Jake Prescott paroled from Albany Prison, Isle of Wight. Political prisoner, member of the anarchist Angry Brigade. One of the crimes police tried to pin on him was the bombing of the Miss World contest.
Major Yallop, head of the Laboratories at Woolwich Arsenal, main witness for the prosecution in the trial of the supposed Angry Brigade, was forced to admit that in addition to the 25 bombings between 1968 & mid 1971 attributed to them, another 1,075 had come through his laboratory.
1973 -- Spain: Anarquista militant members of the MIL (Iberian Liberation Movement), Oriol Solé Sugranyes & José Luis Pons Llobet, are captured near the French border after clashing with the "Guardia Civil."
They are later sent to prison, for 48 & 24 years respectively. Oriol Solé later escaped from a Segovia jail, along with Resistance prisoners, all ETA members but him, but was gunned down & killed trying to get across the border into France.
1973 -- US: The "Lincoln Journal" becomes the first newspaper to move "Doonesbury" comic strip to the editorial page.
1973 -- Chile: Noon. Word had come that some Americans were missing. David Hathaway had been taken from his apartment. Frank Teruggi [American IWW member & journalist] was unaccounted for. Some time that day, our friend Charlie Horman would be seized. I would next see Charlie & Frank a decade later, & then only as celluloid ghosts conjured up in the Costa Gavras film "Missing" (1982).
"Pinochet may have had CIA go-ahead to kill two Americans, documents show" — "The Guardian," February 14, 2000
Teruggi, a friend of Horman's, was arrested by the secret police, held at the National Stadium in Santiago & had his throat slashed.
Though Chilean authorities have never confirmed that Mr. Teruggi was executed, he was arrested at his apartment days after the coup & tortured at the National Stadium, witnesses said. His body was discovered in the morgue 10 days later, riddled with bullet holes.
"F.B.I. Watched an American Who Was Killed in Chile Coup" — "The New York Times," July 1, 2000
1976 -- Canada: Toronto gay activist Brian Mossop is expelled from the Communist Party for being openly gay & advocating homosexuality.
1979 -- US government drops case against The Progressive H-Bomb secret article.
1980 -- Paraguay: Former US terrorist, Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, dethroned, exiled, blown to bits on a street corner.
"Who did it?" ask the journalists in Managua.
"Fuenteovejuna" replies comandante Tomas Borge.
(alluding to Lope de Vega's play in which a town claims collective responsibility for killing a tyrant)
1980 -- Poland: Solidarity forms a national independent labor union federation.
1983 -- West Germany: 3,000 demonstrate against nuclear power, Hamm-Uentrop.
1983 -- US: Vanessa Williams named Miss America, the first African-American winner in the history of the Meat Pageant. Relinquishes her crown after a 1984 scandal. Stages comeback through a recording career, which includes her album, "The Right Stuff."
1983 -- England: 100 photographers record the activities of London on Wedneday, Sept. 17, 1983 for the book 24 Hours in the Life of London.
1985 -- Italy: La cosiddetta giustizia di stato condanna, a 10 anni di reclusione, il presentatore televisivo Enzo Tortora, per attività camorristica. The farce of state justice is a history without aim.
Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]
1988 -- Haiti: Beloved & Respected Comrade Military Government overthrown.
1989 -- US: Who Dealt This Mess? Jay Stewart announcer on "Lets Make a Deal," commits suicide. Couldn't deal with it.
1989 -- US: Ninety-eight miners & a minister occupy the the Pittston Coal Company's Moss 3 preparation plant in Carbo, Virginia, beginning a year-long strike against Pittston Coal.
While a month-long Soviet coal strike dominates US news broadcasts, the year-long Pittston strike garners almost no mainstream press coverage whatsoever.
1990 -- Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character is published. Controversial because of its provocative positions on affirmative action & race relations, it wins a 1992 National Book Award.
1990 -- Philippines: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Pres. Aquino calls for withdrawal of US military forces.
1995 -- Canada: An armed standoff between police & natives occupying a private ranch Gustafsen Lake, BC ends when a medicine man is allowed into the native camp; 17 people are charged by the RCMP.
1995 -- US: Back-to-the-Earth advocate Helen Nearing (1904-1995) dies; with her husband, Scott, they turned out at least 50 books glorifying the back-to-the-land movement.
1998 -- Australia: Huge (sic) Run on Viagra? Soldiers are officially given the all-clear to use performance-enhancing drugs to improve their strength. The more daring claim they will no longer be tools (sic) of the State. Saps no longer, no drooping troops in Kangaroo Land!
2001 -- US: America returns to normal following the September 11 "Attack on America."
America, the largest weapons seller in the world, swears to destroy all weapons manufacturers. The largest military in the world begins to bring its occupation troops home from around the globe. Wall Street reopens, swearing it will put people before profits.
A Beloved & Respected Comrade Shrub-Bush rallies the nation to a "war" footing, to fight all wars & all terrorism — not only individual or group terrorism, but also the largest & worst purveyor of such horrors, state terrorism.
Like all politicians in the new millennium, he demands that morality, not expediency, rule the day.
America unites, vowing human tragedy will not beget another palette of death & destruction. The US government calls its history of military "solutions" suitable to "US interests" a miserable failure, & sets to work to fight for human solutions to problems that sit like a plague upon the world.
Americans are told they can no longer check their brains at the flag pole, not see criticism as traitorous, newspeak become wisdom, freedom sacrificed at the alter of freedom.
No longer does Pogo prove America's greatest political philosopher ("We have seen the enemy..."). Relatives of victims refuse to sell their stories, TV mini-movies will not appear next month. The spectacles of the past will be a past spectacle.
The Great American Way of Life, valuing life above all, reaffirms human & democratic values in the face of evil & the Dark Side. Poetry replaces war, play displaces work, utopian attitudes drive consumerism from the marketplace, gardens consume parking lots, media commits suicide.
America unilaterally commits itself to putting the lie to Randolph Bourne's famed & succinct claim that,
WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE
2007 -- Iraq: US-contract Blackwater mercenaries kill 17 unarmed civilians & wound 27 others in Baghdad. Blackwater quickly changed it's name to the forgettable "XE", & many of the mercenaries seitched to other security firms. In December 2009 an American judge dismissed all charges against the murderers on legal technicalities.
The idyl is gone now. Nothing is left but the dirty realities. Leviathan is all there is. These very words, written words, are inventions of the Lugal's scribes. They cannot convey dream time.
Every meaning has been inverted.
"Central Africa," "Australia," "America" are not the names of places where free human beings ever lived. They are names of unprecedented holocausts, of gigantic colonies, of monstrous Leviathanic trophies. They are Leviathan's "empty continents."
From the vantage point of Death, all Life is an aberration. The languages of the two protagonists are mutually unintelligible. The very vocabularies are untranslatable. Leviathan's world is a Wilderness to free living beings. The freedom of living beings is a Wilderness to Leviathan.
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[Details / context]
France: "La Révolte" first appears. Jean Grave, director of "Le Révolte" in Switzerland since 1883, moved the paper to Paris & changed the name slightly to avoid possible legal prosecution. Published 326 numbers until forced to shut down under state repression ("lois scélérates") in 1894. 
