Today in History

[Tamrin]

Wednesday, 10 April
Salvation Army: Birthday of William Booth, founder (1829)

1778 - Birth of William Hazlitt, English essayist

1827 - Birth of Bro. Gen. Lew Wallace, US Union soldier & author (Ben Hur)

1847 - Birth of Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian-born American publisher (Pulitzer Prizes)

1867 - Birth of George William Russell, Irish nationalist, critic, poet, painter and Theosophist

1880 - Birth of Montague Summers, English author and clergyman (The Vampire)

1941 - Birth of Paul Theroux, American travel writer

1966 - Death of Evelyn Waugh, British writer (Black Mischief)

Juan Williams
American journalist and political analyst
(Born this day 1954)

The Tea Party is a fitting representation of our era of no-debate, politically correct
politics, where each political side has its own media, and opposing views are almost
never given a fair hearing. Conservatives listen only to conservatives, and liberals listen
only to liberals. People are spared the inconvenience of facts that don’t fit their beliefs
and the unpleasantness of seriously considering a point of view other than their own

[Tamrin]

Thursday, 11 April
Industrial Relations: Formation of the International Labour Organisation (1919)
US Human Rights: Civil Rights Act signed into force (LBJ, 1968)

1876 - Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks is organized

1908 - Birth of Leo Rosten, Polish-US writer and humourist

1926 - Death of Bro. Luther Burbank, American botanist

1941 - Birth of Ellen Goodman, American Pulitzer prize winning journalist

1968 - Birth of Sergey Lukyanenko, Russian science fiction author (Night Watch)

1987 - Death of Primo Levi, Italian chemist and writer (Survival in Auschwitz)

2007 - Death of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., American writer ( Slaughterhouse-Five)

Marguerite de Navarre
Queen of Navarre and writer (The Tales of the Heptameron)
(Born this day 1492)

People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach

[Tamrin]

Friday, 12 April
Ancient Rome: Festival of Ceres, goddess of the plenty (first of 8 days)

0065 - Death of Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman and dramatist

1771 - Birth of Henry Clay, American statesman and orator

1910 - Death of William G Sumner, US sociologist (Folkways)

1945 - Death of Bro. Franklin D Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States

1947 - Birth of David Letterman, US comedian (Late Night)

1988 - Death of Alan Stewart Paton, South African writer (Cry, The Beloved Country)

1989 - Death of Abbie Hoffman, US peace activist (Yippie)

Sir Alan Ayckbourn, British dramatist
(Born this day 1939)

The darker the subject, the more light you
must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa

[Tamrin]

Saturday, 13 April
Ancient Rome: Festival of Libertas (goddess of liberty)
US: Huguenot Day (French Treaty of Nantes, this day 1598)

1695 - Death of Jean de La Fontaine, French poet

1743 - Birth of Thomas Jefferson, third US President

1894 - Birth of Bro. Arthur Fadden, 13th Prime Minister of Australia

1901 - Birth of French Jacques Lacan, psychoanalyst and semantician

1906 - Birth of Samuel Beckett, Irish writer (Waiting for Godot)

1919 - Birth of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, American activist (American Atheists)

1949 - Birth of Christopher Hitchens, English-American political writer

Ernst Cassirer
German-American neo-Kantian philosopher of science and of culture
(Died this day 1945)

No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our
knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have
amassed an astonishingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical
instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved,
and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless,
not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material...
Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can
have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in
a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity

[Tamrin]

Sunday, 14 April
Japan: Takayama Spring Festival (first of two days)

1126 - Birth of Averroes, Arab Spanish physician, philosopher and polymath

1865 - Fatal shooting of Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President

1889 - Birth of Arnold Toynbee, English historian (A Study of History)

1892 - Birth of V. Gordon Childe, Australian archaeologist (Man Makes Himself)

1950 - Death of Ramana Marashi, Indian sage (Advaita Vedanta)

1964 - Death of Rachel L Carson, US biologist and author (Silent Spring)

1986 - Death of Simone de Beauvoir, French feminist author (Deuxième Sexe)

Christiaan Huygens, FRS
Dutch astronomer (discovered Saturn's rings)
(Born this day 1629)

The world is my country, science is my religion

[Tamrin]

Monday, 15 April
Ottoman Empire: Birth of Mimar Sinan, Suleiman the Magnificent’s principal architect

1452 - Birth of Leonardo da Vinci, Italian polymath

1469 - Birth of Nanak, 1st guru of the Sikhs

1707 - Birth of Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician and physicist

1858 - Birth of Émile Durkheim, French social scientist (Father of Sociology)

1883 - Birth of Bro. Viscount Stanley Melbourne Bruce, 8th Australian PM

1912 - RMS Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage, after striking an iceberg

1980 - Death of Jean-Paul Sartre, French existentialist philosopher and activist

Rupert Brooke
English poet (war sonnets, The Soldier)
(Died this day 1915)

We are earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here, Life is our cry. We have
kept the faith! And when we die, all’s over that is ours; and life burns on
through other lovers, other lips, heart of my heart, heaven is now, is won!

[Tamrin]

Tuesday, 16 April
Burmese New Year, a day of jokes and foolery

1689 - Death of Aphra Behn, English novelist, playwright and spy

1844 - Birth of Anatole France, French writer (The Wickerwork Woman), Nobel 1921

1859 - Death of Alexis de Tocqueville, French political thinker (Democracy in America)

1884 - Grand Lodge of South Australia (& the Northern Territory) was established in Adelaide

1918 - Birth of Spike Milligan, KBE, Indian-British-Irish comedian, writer and poet

1953 - Birth of Peter Garrett, AM, MP, Australian politician and musician, (Midnight Oil)

2003 - Makobo Modjadji was crowned the new Rain Queen of Balobedu

Ralph Ellison
American writer (Invisible Man)
(Died this day 1994)

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone,
fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me

[Tamrin]

Wednesday, 17 April
Commemoration of Bro. Benjamin Franklin (died this day 1790)

0485 - Death of Diadochus Proclus, Neoplatonic philosopher (successor to Hypatia)

1621 - Birth of Henry Vaughan, Welsh physician and metaphysical poet (Silex Scintillans)

1885 - Birth of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (aka Isak Dinesen), Danish writer

1897 - Birth of Nisargadatta Maharaj, Indian Guru and philosopher (Advaita Vedanta)

1975 - Death of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian philosopher and statesman

1994 - Death of Roger Wolcott Sperry, US neuropsychologist, neurobiologist (Nobel Laureate)

1996 - Death of Piet Hein, Danish mathematician, scientist, inventor and poet

Sir Leonard Woolley
British archaeologist (Ur of the Chaldees)
(Born this day 1880)

When digging ceases to be a great game and becomes,
as in Egypt, merely business, it will be a bad thing

[Tamrin]

Thursday, 18 April
Ottoman Empire: Death of Roxelana[/color], wife of Suleiman the Magnificent (Ottoman Emperors rarely wed)

1580 - Birth of Thomas Middleton, English Jacobean playwright and poet

1772 - Birth of David Ricardo, English economist (The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation)

1817 - Birth of George Henry Lewes, English philosophical writer (Life of Goethe)

1857 - Birth of Clarence S Darrow, US defense attorney at the Scopes monkey trial

1947 - Birth of Kathy Acker (Karen Alexander), American experimental writer

1955 - Death of Albert Einstein, German-American physicist (E=MC²)

1959 - Birth of Susan C. Faludi, American feminist, author and journalist (Pulitzer Prize)

Bro. Dr. Erasmus Darwin, (Co-founder of the Lunar Society)
British physician and botanist, grand-father of Charles Darwin
(Died this day 1802)

Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth
began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history
of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have
arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality,
with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed
by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the
faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering
down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

[Tamrin]

Friday, 19 April
Ancient Greece: Mounichia, honouring Artemis and Iphegenia
Ancient Rome: Cerealia, for the goddess Ceres

1787 - The Grand Lodge of Maryland was instituted

1824 - Death of Lord Byron, British poet (Romanticism)

1850 - The Grand Lodge of California was instituted

1881 - Death of Benjamin Disraeli, British PM and novelist

1882 - Death of Charles Robert Darwin, FRS, British evolutionist (Origin of Species)

1897 - Leo Taxil’s anti-masonic hoax revealed as such

1914 - Death of Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher, chemist and polymath

Eliot Ness
American Prohibition agent (The Untouchables)
(Born this day 1903)

Doubts raced through my mind as I considered the feasibility of
enforcing a law which the majority of honest citizens didn't seem to want