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December 11
December 11 is the 11th day in December.
Events[edit]
1282 — Wales: Death of the last true Prince of Wales, Llywelyn. [1]
1781 — Scotland: Sir David Brewster inventor of the kaleidoscope lives. [2]
1810 — Romantic poet Alfred de Musset lives, Paris, France. Heine describes him as “a young man with a promising pastâ€. [3]
1864 — Maurice Leblanc lives. French author and journalist, known as the creator of Arsène Lupin, French gentlemanâ€thief turned detective.
1872 — United States of America: P.B.S. Pinchback, a mulatto, sworn in as first black member of U.S. House of Representatives.
1875 — Robert Louis Stevenson complains of Robert Browningʼs prolific output: “He floods acres of paper with brackets and inverted commas.†[4] [5]
1890 — Mark Tobey, artist, lives (1890 — 1976) — celebrator of Pike Street Market (where the anarchist Left Bank Books is located) and other things Seattleian. [6] [7]
1906 — Birago Ismael Diop lives, Dakar, French West Africa (now Senegal). Senegalese poet and recorder of traditional folktales and legends of the Wolof people.
1911 — Mexico: Yaquis in Sonora, influenced by the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, reclaim stolen communal lands (“Tierra y Libertad!â€). Their war with government lasts, officially, until 1929. [8] [9]
1911 — Author Naguib Mahfouz lives.
1912 — United States of America: Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman speak at the Chicago celebration of Peter Kropotkinʼs (the “Anarchist Prince,†born December 9) birthday. They had previously celebrated his 70th birthday in New York City on the December 7th.
1917 — United States of America: Thirteen black soldiers hanged for alleged participation in a riot in Houston, Texass.
1918 — Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Gulag Archipelago) lives, Kislovodsk in Caucasus Mountains. [10]
1919 — United States of America: Enterprise, Alabama unveils its monument to the Boll Weevil.
1920 — Ireland: Martial law declared due to Irish Republican Army rebellion.
1922 — American author Grace Paley lives.
1927 — China: Sovietâ€style Canton Commune begins. Wiped out after three days fighting by the Russian Communist-supplied Kuo Min Tang. Marxist dogmatism betrays the best chance yet of proletarian power in China.
1928 — Society of Friends of Music is founded at the Library of Congress, DC. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1928 — Argentina: Buenos Aires police thwart an attempt on US pres.-elect Herbert Hoover. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1928 — Cuba: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea lives, Havana. Important director in the “Golden Age,†and his later Fresa y chocolate (1993), about intolerance, and portraying the friendship between a homosexual and a young communist, is the first Cuban production ever nominated for the Oscars. Earlier films include Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), Inconsolable Memories (1968). [11]
1930 — United States of America: 60-branch Bank of the United States suspends payments — largest bank failure to date in New York State history.
1932 — United States of America: Snow falls in Frisco, California.
1933 — Portugal: The militant anarchoâ€syndicalist Acácio Tomás de Aquino is arrested and imprisoned until 1949. Tossed into the the Trafaria penitentiary, he is sent to Angra do HeroÃsmo (1934 — 1937), and then spends the next 10+ years in the Tarrafal concentration camp in the Cape Verde Islands until his release in September 1949. [12] [13]
1937 — Spain: Angel Pestaña Núñez, dies, in Bagà , Barcelone. Militant Spanish anarchoâ€syndicalist and later a reformist who ran for election. Many state and party officials attend his funeral, with exception of the Communists. Indalecio Prieto, Spanish minister of defense, presents a mourning speech: “We lost a great man, when we most needed himâ€.
1937 — Italy leaves the League of Nations. Germany and Japan left the League of Nations in 1933. The League is helpless against the aggressive atmosphere in Europe, the world is on the edge of a world war again. [14]
1937 — American author Jim Harrison lives.
1939 — American author Tom McGuane lives.
1941 — United States of America: The Western Defense Command is established with Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt as commander. The West Coast is declared a theater of war.
1946 — United States of America: During this month Beatster Jack Kerouac meets Neal Cassady. Kerouacʼs marriage to Edie Parker, whom he married in 1944 for bail money, is annulled. Earlier this year he begins writing The Town and the City, Herbert Huncke introduces the word “beat†to Kerouac, et. al ., and he begins using the drug Benzedrine regularly. [Exact dates not given — ed.] [15]
1950 — Bertrand Russell recommends that all warmongers spend time in a boat in a sharkâ€infested pool. We humbly suggest they forget the part about the boat. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1951 — United States of America: Illinois State mine inspector approve coal dust removal techniques at New Orient mine in West Frankfurt. Ten days later, largely because of coal dust accumulations, the mine exploded, killing 119 workers.
1958 — Italy: Alberto Meschi (1879 — 1958), anarchist, dies.
1958 — Archibald MacLeish play “JB†opens, NY (364 performances, Pulitzer). [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1960 — Algeria: French paratroopers fire on civilians in Algiers, killing at least 65.
1961 — United States of America: JFK provides US military helicopters and crews to South Vietnam. Kennedy orders 425 helicopter crewmen sent to provide training and support for South Vietnamese forces. They are the first U.S. military personnel to be sent.
1964 — United States of America: Antiâ€Castro terrorists attempt to assassinate Che Guevara during his speech at the United Nations in New York City. [16] [17] [18]
1965 — United States of America: Novelist/prankster/anarchoid Ken Kesey holds his Third Acid Test, at a Palo Alto nightclub. [Source: Robert Braunwart] [19]
1965 — Sciâ€fi writer Brian W. Aldiss marries Margaret Manson. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1969 — United States of America: Leaking nerve gas necessitates the evacuation of the Armyʼs Chemical Warfare Test Center near Dugway, Utah. (or the December 19th?)
1969 — United States of America: The Big Rock School — a free school run by Ute, Creek, Blackfoot, Paiute, Comanche and Mono instructors — is established by the Indians Of All Tribes occupiers on Alcatraz, the prison island where nineteen Hopi men had been incarcerated for refusing to send their children to stateâ€run schools. [Source: Calendar Riots]
1971 — John Lennon releases album containing songs with the word “fuck.†“If you canʼt say ‘fuck,’ you canʼt say ‘fuck the government.’†— Lenny Bruce
1971 — United States of America: Third retrial of Black Panther head, Huey Newton, ends in mistrial.
1972 — James Brown is arrested after a show in Knoxville, Tennessee and charged with “disorderly conduct.†Brown and two members of his entourage were talking to fans about narcotics use when a white man told police the singer was trying to incite a riot. However, after Brown threatens to sue the city for $1 million, the event is then termed a “misunderstanding.â€
1974 — French priest Georges de Nantes is convicted of libeling Jacques Isorni in an argument over who was responsible for crucifying Jesus. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1976 — “Nature†publishes an article entitled “Naming the Loch Ness Monster†(“Nessiteras rhombopteryx†is suggested). [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1978 — United States of America: Six masked men bound 10 employees at Lufthansa cargo area at New York Kennedy Airport and take off with $5.8 M in cash and jewelry.
1980 — United States of America: Nancy Reagan reveals she keeps a gun in a drawer near her bed. “Ronnie was away a lot, you know,†she explains, “and I was alone in that house.†and what kind of gun is it? She laughs. “Itʼs just a tiny little gun.†[20]
1983 — First visit to a Lutheran church by a pope (John Paul II in Rome).
1984 — England: 20,000 women turn out for antiâ€nuke demonstration at Greenham Common.
1984 — Nobel Prizeâ€winner (1977) Vicente Aleixandre dies.
1986 — South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone treaty comes into effect.
1986 — U.N. agency UNICEF, promoting child education, established. The program becomes a center of U.S. refusal to pay its U.N. dues, with the U.S. claiming that UNICEF programs were socialist and antiâ€American.
1987 — Egypt: Collision of a bus and a train on the outskirts of Cairo causes the deaths of 50 schoolchildren, 6 teachers, and the bus driver.
1991 — Artur Lundkvist, dies in Stockholm.
1991 — Salman Rushdie calls for his novel, Satanic Verses, to be issued in paperback. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
1994 — Chile invited to enter NAFTA at Summit of the Americas, Miami. The US government and a few elite US corporations have long ago replaced Chilean democracy with a military dictatorship under the butcher Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet undertakes a campaign of genocide against labor, activist workers and those to the left of his extreme rightwing pals. American Republicans love him. In the economic realm, soâ€called “radical†capitalist economist Milton Friedman has plotted out an economic dictatorship. Together they effect a destruction and terrorism in Chile in mere years — while decrying Castroʼs comparatively “mild†tyranny, now decades old. [21] [22] [23]
1994 — Chechnya: Russia invades. Seems just like yesterday. Or today. Alexander Brener, in one of his most political actions, went to Red Square in boxing equipment in the middle of the war campaign in Chechnya and shouted in the direction of the Kremlin: “Yeltsin, come out!â€
1998 — United States of America: Microradio movement news accounts on the struggle to free the airwaves: FCC Closes Micropower Station in Gainesville, Florida. [Source: Pirate Radio Kisok]
1999 — Mexico: Mexico City UNAM Strikers Demand Freedom for Mumia Abuâ€Jamal, Protest Seattle Repression. Riot police arrest students after a protest at the US embassy, today, opposing police-state repression at the recent World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
2001 — United States of America: Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui becomes the only person charged in the US for the September 11 terrorist attacks; he has been in jail since August 17. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
2002 — China: Dinosaur named for Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton.
2002 — United States of America: Another US Star Wars antimissile test fails - record is now 5 “successes†out of 8 at shooting down targets that contain homing beacons. [Source: Robert Braunwart]
