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January 12
January 12 is the 12th day in January.
Events[edit]
1493 — Sicily: Last day for all Jews to leave.
1517 — Vasco Núñez de Balboa Spanish conquistador/admiral, beheaded at 41.
1628 — French writer Charles Perrault lives. In the story of Cinderella, he mistranslated vair, the word for fur, as verre, glass, thus making her wear glass slippers.
1641 — United States of America: James City, Virginia, passes law that if any Indian commits a crime, the first Indian apprehended must pay penalty, with life if necessary.
1723 — Philosopher/statesman Edmund Burke lives, Dublin.
1751 — Russian-born German poet / dramatist of the Strum und Drang period, Jokob Michael Reinhold Lenz, lives, Sesswegen.
1817 — Alba (christened) Allegra, the daughter that Claire Clairmont bore to Lord Byron, lives. Dies at the age of five in a convent in Bagnacavallo near Ravenna where here father placed her after taking her away from Claire & the Shelley household. Some question lingers as to whether Byron or Shelley was the child's father.
1833 — United States of America: Act passed making it unlawful for any Indian to remain within the boundaries of the state of Florida.
1836 — France: Sighting of a luminous body, seemingly two-thirds size of the moon, rotating on an axis, with a central dark cavity, Cherbourg, [Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860-77] [1] [2]
1848 — Charlotte Brontë writes to G.H. Lewes that she finds Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice merely "An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face." [3]
1856 — American artist John Singer Sergeant lives. Though he lived much of his life in England and was buried there, he refused knighthood in 1907 because he still considered himself an American.
1863 — Indian mystic Vivekanada lives.
1864 — United States of America: Kit Carson's patrol kills 11 Navajo in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona Territory.
1876 — Jack London, sailor tramp, gold miner, author (The Call of the Wild) hits the road, lives, San Francisco. [4] [5] [6]
1879 — The British-Zulu War begins as British troops under Lieutenant General Frederic Augustus invade Zululand from the southern African republic of Natal.
1880 — Anglo-American sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein lives. Created the sculpture for the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. "I think I am rather more than a Socialist. I am something of an Anarchist, I believe…"
1883 — France: In Lyon at the trial of the workers' International, begun on January 8 against the anarchists known as "The 66", the 'Anarchist Declaration' is read out to the court. Likely written by Peter Kropotkin, one of those tried and convicted, it is a summary of the ideals of the accused.
1893 — Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi race theorist, lives, Reval, Estonia. Joins the Nazi Party before Hitler, administers occupied Russia during World War II, & is executed at Nuremberg for war crimes.
1893 — Nazi leader Hermann Goring lives.
1893 — Jack London, on his 17th birthday, sails on the seal-hunting ship "Sophie Sutherland", gaining experience he used in his novel The Sea Wolf.
1896 — H.L. Smith takes the first x-ray photograph. It is a hand with a bullet in it. The hand is attached to a corpse. [7]
1899 — Oscar Wilde writes to Robert Ross that "Henry James is developing, but he will never arrive at passion, I fear." [8]
1900 — United States of America: Freeland utopian colony founded at Holmes Harbor, Whidby Island, Island County, north of Seattle, Washington.
1905 — Cowboy actor and singer Tex Ritter lives. He was a law student at the University of Texas before starting his entertainment career.
1906 — Woodward Maurice, country singer, lives, Texas.
1906 — Henny Youngman, the violin-playing comic from vaudeville, lives to give his wife away.
1906 — England: The Liberals win a landslide in UK; the 1st Labour MPs are returned. [Source: Robert Braunwart] [9]
1912 — United States of America: 9a.m. in one of the departments of the Everett Mill, a worker lets out the yell, "Goddamn it to hell! Let's strike! Strike!" and the Lawrence textile strike against a recent reduction in wages and increased work rates begins. Over a thousand workers rampage from room to room tearing the weaves and smashing machines then proceed to other factories in the district. Victory will be achieved precisely two months later, winning an increase in wages from 5 to 25%. [Source: Calendar Riots]
1913 — United States of America: Emma Goldman delivers six Sunday lectures in New York City (January 12 — February 16) on the modern drama. Emma lectures on the plays of Scandinavian, German, Austrian, French, English, & Russian dramatists including August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Frank Wedekind, Maurice Maeterlinck, Edmond Rostand, Octave Mirbeau, Eugène Brieux, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Pinero, John Galsworthy, Charles Rann Kennedy, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorki, and Leonid Andreyev. [10]
1915 — Paul Jarrico (1915 — 1997) lives.
1916 — United States of America: A "shock" felt, buildings shaken, flashes seen in the sky, Cincinnati, Ohio [New York Herald, Jan 13] [11] [12]
1922 — China: Three-year strike wave begins.
1926 — Pedro Augusto Mota (189? — 1926) dies.
1928 — United States of America: Police raid Industrial Workers of the World Hall, Walsenburg, Colorado.
1928 — Police seize 800 copies of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.
1928 — United States of America: Ruth Snyder and lover Harry Gray executed at Sing Sing, ending one of the most notorious adultery-murder scandals in American history. A photographer sneaked into the death chamber and snapped her photo at the moment the chair was activated.
1932 — United States of America: Ophelia Wyatt Caraway, a Democrat from Arkansas, becomes the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Caraway, born near Bakerville, Tennessee, was appointed to the Senate two months before to fill the vacancy left by her late husband, Thaddeus Horatio Caraway. With the support of Huey Long, a powerful senator from Louisiana, Caraway was popularly elected to the seat.
1932 — United States of America: 12,000 marchers from Father Cox's Shantytown (another "Hooverville") in Pittsburg arrive in Washington, D.C. Located near St. Patrick's Catholic Church in the Strip District of Pittsburgh, the shantytown existed from 1929 to 1932, & was the staging base for the Reverend James Cox's unemployed army. On December 1931, 60,000 unemployed workers had rallied at Pitt Stadium in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. [13]
1933 — Spain: The anarchist uprisings which began on January 8 are brutally suppressed. Their greatest successes were in Andalusia. Police & army buildings were attacked, and the anarcho-trade unionists seized public buildings and proclaimed Libertarian Communism there. In the small village of Casas Viejas, the government "Gardes d'assaut" demonstrate their cruelty by assassinating many of the the villagers, burning alive others gathered in a thatched cottage. See also 1984 below. [14]
1936 — A.D. Winans lives, Frisco, California. Part of the Beat movement. [15] [16]
1940 — Canada: During this month Emma Goldman's mail is intercepted by pinch-faced censors, their suspicion raised by the many letters containing money pouring into her address for the defense of Arthur Bortolotti, whose case attracts further attention in the US through articles in the Nation & the New Republic by Goldman. Bortolotti is released on bail, charged now with immigration violations rather than a breach of the War Measures Act. By mid-January, Goldman returns to raising funds for the Spanish anarchists & continues to raise funds & awareness about Bortolotti's case. [Also during this month her niece & one-time secretary, Stella Ballantine, recovers from a nervous breakdown after nearly two years.]
1943 — Frankfurters replaced by Victory Sausages (mix of meat & soy meal).
1948 — Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi quickly begins his final fast. Ghandi has hopes of staving off war between Indians & Pakistanis. He is assassinated later in the month (See January 30).
1948 — England: London's Manor Park Co-operative Society leads the way in consumerist recuperation by opening the first supermarket in Britain. [Source: Calendar Riots]
1951 — International Convention on Genocide comes into force.
1953 — In "Time" magazine Thornton Wilder says, "Literature is the orchestration of platitudes." [17]
1954 — United States of America: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announces U.S. abandonment of President Truman's doctrine of "containing Communism" for a new policy of "massive retaliation" — deterring "red aggression" by threatening to respond with a rain of nuclear bombs. Still, US troops are strung around the globe like a gaudy necklace…
1954 — Austria's worst avalanche kills 200; 9 hours later a second one-kills 115. Every year, as many as one million avalanches fall throughout the world… [18]
1960 — Nevil Shute dies. British-born Australian novelist, best-known for the novel On the Beach (1957). A pessimistic tale of the atomic age adapted to the screen in 1959. The film is one of the most celebrated anti-Bomb films. [19]
1962 — United States of America: President Kennedy signs Executive Order 10988, guaranteeing federal workers the right to join unions & bargain collectively.
1963 — Bob Dylan sings Blowin' In the Wind on the BBC Radio presentation of The Madhouse on Castle Street. The song became a classic of the 1960s protest movement. [20]
1964 — Zanzibar: Black rebels overthrow the predominantly Arab government after heavy fighting. Zanzibar became a British colony in the 19th century. The British established a protectorate in 1890, treating Zanzibar as an Arab state though Arabs constituted only 1/6th the population. In today's fighting, the black majority is led by John Okello, whose small army attacks the Zanzibar armory & seizes the radio station. The Sultan flees on his yacht. Independence does not dramatically change the country's social relations. Arabs own the large plantations & run the government. Eventually Zanzibar forms a union with Tanganyika. The new nation becomes Tanzania. [21]
1965 — Playwright Lorraine Hansberry dies in New York, her promising career cut short by cancer. Her popular play, A Raisin in the Sun, is the first drama by a black woman produced on Broadway.
1968 — The Supremes appear in an episode of the NBC-TV show, "Tarzan." The ladies, fittingly, play a group of nuns. Its members have continued to gray: the median age for American nuns is now 67 years old. Lenny Bruce sends his regrets.
1968 — US & Cambodia announce an agreement designed to insulate Cambodia from the war in Vietnam. Not to fear; Dick M. Nixon & Henry Hank will uninsulate'em with a rain of bombs & secret invaders, setting the stage for another sequel in the "killing fields". [22] [23] [24] [25]
1969 — England: Some 5,000 anti-racism marchers clash with London Bobbies during an immigration protest.
1970 — Nigerian Civil War / Biafran war ends. Those seeking independence for the eastern province of Biafra in Nigeria surrender.
1971 — United States of America: Reverend Philip Berrigan, founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship anti-Vietnam War activism organization, is indicted with five others on charges of conspiring to kidnap national security advisor and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient Henry Hank Kissinger and to bomb the heating systems of federal buildings in Washington, D.C. At the time, Berrigan was serving six years at a federal prison in Connecticut with his brother Daniel for their destruction of military draft records in Maryland during 1967/68. In 1969, the two brothers, both Catholic priests, launched a hunger strike in Danbury Prison as part of their antiwar protest. In 1970, Berrigan conspired with others outside of the prison to stage the more dramatic publicity stunt of kidnapping Kissinger & depriving federal buildings of heat in the dead of winter. Philip was indicted on antiwar conspiracy charges along with Maryknoll Sister Elizabeth McAllister, & three other priests (Joseph Wenderoth, Neil McLaughlin, Anthony Scoblick, a former priest) & Eqbal Ahmad, a fellow of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of Public Affairs. In the subsequent trial, the six avoided conviction on the more serious charges of conspiracy to kidnap & bomb federal buildings; Berrigan & McAllister were convicted of smuggling mail out of a federal penitentiary.
1971 — United States of America: "All in the Family" premiers on CBS, featured first toilet flush on TV. Norman Lear's ground-breaking show, originally called "Those Were the Days," was based on the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. It lasted until 1983. [26]
1971 — England: The home of Robert Carr MP is bombed after he introduces the Industrial Relations Bill in a drive to crush trade unionism. The bombing is attributed to an organised "Angry Brigade". A 'mysterious young Scot' story is featured, fingering anarchist Stuart Christie as the major suspect for every armed action in resistance to the Government's plans for industrial slavery. Jake Prescott is arrested this month, Ian Purdie in March, as suspects. [27]
1974 — A special issue on productivity in "Business Week" appears today (1974 or 76?). The January l2 issue of "Business Week" contains his call for a symbolic dedication on July 4, 1976, "with the actual signing of a document-a Declaration of Interdependence" between labor & business, "inseparably linked in the productivity quest." Productivity-output per hour of work has of course fallen due to worker dissatisfaction & unrest. A basic indication of the continuing revolt against work are the joint campaigns for higher productivity, such as the widely publicized US Steel-United Steelworkers efforts. A special issue on productivity in "Business Week" for September 9, 1972, highlighted the problem, pointing out also the opposition workers had for union-backed drives of this kind. Closely related to low productivity, it seems, is the employee resistance to working overtime, even during economic recession. The refusal of thousands of Ford workers to overtime prompted a Ford executive in April, 1974 to say, "We're mystified by the experience in light of the general economic situation." Also during April, the Labor Department reported that "the productivity of American workers took its biggest drop on record as output slumped in all sectors of the economy during the first quarter." — John Zerzan, Organized Labor versus "The Revolt Against Work" [28]
1976 — Agatha Christie, master of the "cozy" detective novel, playwright, & Dame of the British Empire (1971), dies in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Obviously, the Butler did it. Her books sold over 100,000,000 copies, were translated into more than 100 languages, & one play, The Mouse Trap, set a world record for continuous performances at one theater (8,862 over a 21 year period).
1983 — Spain: 6th CNT-AIT anarchist Congress, Barcelona (January 12-16th).
1984 — United States of America: Cholesterol is linked to heart disease after 10-year study by the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute.
1984 — Spanish film by José Luis Lopez del Rio, Casas Viejas documents the tragic events of 1933, including interviews with survivors from the village.
1986 — In Frisco, California, Beat poet Bob Kaufman dies, still and quiet eternally after many years of a vowed silence. [29]
1987 — Twenty West German judges arrested for blockading the U.S. Air Force base at Mutlangen, West Germany.
1989 — Six claim to survive in rubble, 35 days after Armenian quake (hoax).
1990 — Laurence J. Peter, author of Peter Principle, in a stroke of bad luck, peters out at 70.
1997 — HAL becomes operational (2001: A Space Odyssey). [30]
1999 — India: A national conference of peasants & agricultural workers held at village Parmandal in Multai. This was to mark the anniversary of police firing on a peaceful peasant demonstration last year. The Conference was jointly organised by National Alliance of People’s Movements, Bharat Jan Andolan & Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (Multai). The Multai Manifesto was adopted.
2002 — England: Anarchist flag appears atop the Argentine Embassy! Scaling the heights of one of the slag heaps of authority to signal the need of a large dustbin for this debt-ridden fleabag.
2007 — Google censors Uruknet.info, Iraqi news web site, from Google News. No reason was given. [Source: Smygo: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo/]
