Today in History

[Tamrin]

29 November

1530 - Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, adviser to England's King Henry VIII, dies

1803 - Birth of Christian Doppler, discovered Doppler Effect (color shift)

1811 - Birth of Wendell Phillips, women's suffrage/antislavery/prison reformer

1832 - Birth of Louisa May Alcott, Germantown PA, author (Little Women)

1898 - Birth of C.S. Lewis, English writer/scholar (Le Roman de la Rosa)

1947 - UN Gen Assembly partitions Palestine between Arabs & Jews

1961 - Freedom Riders attacked by white mob at bus station in Miss

C.S. Lewis
(Born this day 1898)

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing
to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is,
by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one
who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride

[Tamrin]

30 November

0030 - BCE - Cleopatra VII, last of the Pharaohs, commits suicide [or is murdered]

1554 - Birth of Philip Sidney, England, poet/statesman/soldier (Arcadia)

1667 - Birth of Jonathan Swift, England, satirist (Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal)

1835 - Birth of Samuel Clemens [Mark Twain], author (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn)

1874 - Birth of Sir Winston Churchill, (C) British PM (1940-45, 1951-55, Nobel 1953)

1900 - Oscar Wilde, Irish author, dies in Paris

1936 - Birth of Abbie Hoffman aka Free, Yippie/activist/author (Steal this Book)

Abbie Hoffman
(Died this day 1936)

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents,
not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists

[Tamrin]

1 December

1886 - Birth of Rex Stout, U.S.A., mystery writer (Nero Wolf)

1893 - Birth of Ernst Toller, Poland, writer

1947 - Aleister Edward S Crowley, British occultist, dies at 72

1955 - Rosa Parks (black), U.SA., arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus

1973 - Australia grants self-government to Papua New Guinea

1987 - James Arthur Baldwin, U.S.A., writer (Another Country), dies at 63

1988 - Benazir Bhutto named 1st female PM of a Moslem country (Pakistan)

Rosa Parks

Why do you all push us around?

[Tamrin]

2 December

1804 - Napoleon Bonaparte crowned 1st emperor of France in Paris by Pope Pius VII

1814 - Marquis de Sade, writer, dies at 74

1859 - John Brown, US abolitionist, hanged in Charles Town WV at 59

1929 - 1st skull of Peking man found, 50 km out of Peking at Tsjoe Koe Tien

1937 - Birth of Brian Lumley, England, author (Complete Crow, Psychomech, Beneath the Moors)

1988 - UN votes 151-2 (Israel & US) to move PLO debate to Geneva, Britain abstains

1995 - [William] Robertson Davies, novelist essayist/dramatist, dies

Brian Lumley
(Born this day 1937)

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show
he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

[Tamrin]

3 December

1838 - Birth of Octavia Hill, British reformer, leader of open-space movement

1857 - Birth of Joseph Conrad, Poland, novelist (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness)

1894 - Robert Louis Stevenson, English writer (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde), dies at 45

1895 - Birth of Anna Freud, Austrian/English psychoanalyst/daughter of Sigmund Freud

1910 - Mary Baker Eddy, founder (Christian Science (Monitor)), dies

1967 - 1st human heart transplant performed (Dr Christiaan Barnard, South Africa)

1984 - 2,000 die from Union Carbide poison gas emission in Bhopal, India

Anna Freud
(Born this day 1895)

Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?

[Tamrin]

4 December
Roman Catholic: Commemoration of St Barbara, virgin/martyr (one of our Patron Saints)
México: Day of the Artisans

1795 - Birth of Thomas Carlyle, Scotland, essayist/historian (French Revolution)

1807 - Prince Hall, activist/Masonic leader, dies in Boston

1829 - Britain abolished "suttee" in India (widow burning herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre)

1865 - Birth of Edith Louisa Cavell, England, nurse (WWI)

1906 - Alpha Phi Alpha, 1st Black Greek Letter Fraternity, forms

1915 - Ku Klux Klan receives charter from Fulton County GA

1975 - Hannah Arendt, German/US sociologist, dies at 69

Edith Cavell
(Born this day 1865)

I realize that patriotism is not enough.
I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone

[Tamrin]

5 December

1484 - Innocent VIII issued his famous "Witch Bull"

1776 - Phi Beta Kappa, 1st American scholastic fraternity (William & Mary College), is founded

1791 - Bro. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer, dies in Vienna, Austria, at 35

1870 - Bro. Alexandre Dumas, writer (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo), dies at 68

1901 - Birth of Walter Elias Disney, Chicago IL, animator (Mickey Mouse)

1901 - Birth of Werner Heisenberg, German physicist/discovered uncertainty (Nobel 1932)

1955 - Historic bus boycott begins in Montgomery AL by Rosa Parks

Bro. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(Born this day 1791)

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together
go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius

[Tamrin]

6 December

1849 - Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery in Maryland

1882 -Anthony Trollope, England, writer, dies

1886 - Birth of Joyce Kilmer, US, (male) poet (Trees)

1898 - Birth of Gunnar Myrdal, Sweden, sociologist/economist (Nobel 1974)

1909 - Kenneth Watkins, woodland conservationist

1954 - Simone de Beauvoir receives Prix Goncourt

1956 - Nelson Mandela & 156 others arrested for political activities in South Africa

Joyce Kilmer
(Born this day 1886)

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree

[Tamrin]

7 December
US: Pearl Harbor Day (1941)

1888 - Birth of Joyce Cary, Anglo-Irish (male) writer (House of Children)

1889 - Birth of Honoré-Gabriel Marcel, French philosopher/playwright

1895 - Battle at Amba Alagi: Abyssinians beat Italian armies

1928 - Birth of Noam Chomsky, linguist (founded transformational grammar)

1941 - Japanese attack Pearl Harbor (a date that will live in infamy [as will 8 July 1853])

1975 - Indonesian army occupies East Timor

1985 - Robert Graves, English writer/poet (King Jesus [The White Goddess, I Claudius]), dies at 90

Joyce Cary
(Born this day 1888)

It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know
- the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything

[Tamrin]

8 December
Japan: Enlightenment of the Buddha

0065 -BCE- Birth of Horace, Rome, lyric poet/satirist (Satire, Odes)

1587 - Mary Queen of Scots (1560-1587), executed

1854 - Pope Pius IX proclaims Immaculate Conception, makes Mary, free of Original Sin

1903 - Herbert Spencer, British engineer/philosopher, dies at 83

1913 - Birth of Delmore Schwartz, US, poet/short story writer/critic (Shenandoah)

1943 - Birth of Jim Morrison, Melbourne FL, singer (Doors)

1980 - John Lennon assassinated at 40 in New York by Mark David Chapman

Delmore Schwartz
(Born this day 1913)

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you