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March 11
March 11 is the 11th day in March.
Events
537 — Goths lay siege to Rome.
1544 — Torquato Tasso (1544—1595) lives. Greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, best remembered for his masterpiece Jerusalem Delivered (1575). [1]
1726 — Mme d'Épinay lives, Valenciennes. Friend of Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire. Best known for Conversations of Emily and three volume Memoirs and Correspondence.
1744 — England: Sothebyʼs, the London auctioneers, has its roots in this day, as Samuel Baker begins a 10-night sale of "several Hundred scarce and valuable Books". His nephew, a Sotheby, takes over the business when they close the book on Baker.
1811 — England: Luddites attack machines designed to replace them in the weaving of wool. As part of their strike, Luddites riot, protesting capitalism by smashing machines that dehumanise them — 63 frames broken up at Arnold near Nottingham. Source: [Luddite Chonology]
1812 — England: Luddites suffer first defeat at Rawkolds Mill, Great Britain. Source: [Luddite Chonology]
1818 — Mary Shelley publishes her Frankenstein novel. [2]
1833 — Nicaragua: US troops "intervene".
1835 — William Makepeace Thackeray, after reading Charlotte Brontëʼs Villette, is moved to comment: "The poor little woman of genius!…I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame…she wants some Tomkins or other to…be in love with."
1845 — New Zealand: Maori uprising against British rule. Today Ngapuhi attack and take Kororareka (now Russell) township, Bay of Islands. Approx 50 deaths altogether. British settlers flee to Auckland. The Maoris realized that the white settlers were increasing at a fast rate, and several violent Maori uprisings occurred between 1845 and 1848, and between 1860 and 1872. These uprisings are known as the New Zealand Wars. [Source: Working Class Encyclopedia]
1847 — United States of America: Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman dies. Known as Johnny Appleseed for his large number of fruit tree plantings. He is regarded as the "patron saint" of orchardists in the US, and this is celebrated as his day.
1850 — Clément Duval lives (1850—1935). Anarchist illegalist, member of "La panthère des Batignolles," sentenced to death by a French court for a burglary (in which a policeman was wounded trying to apprehend him). Duval spent 14 years in prison in Guyana where he attempted over 20 escapes. Finally, in 1901, he made good his escape and eventually slipped into New York City, where he lived until age 85, supported and surrounded by Italian and French anarchist comrades. "Vous m'inculpez de vol, comme si un travailleur qui ne possède rien peut être un voleur. Non, le vol n'existe que dans l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme, en un mot par ceux qui vivent aux dépens de la classe productrice".
1857 — Spain: Spanish war poet Manuel José Quintana, dies in Madrid. Wrote classical odes marked by patriotism and liberalism, including the two-volume Vidas de españoles célebres ("Lives of Famous Spaniards").
1858 — India: During the Great Indian Indian Mutiny (also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, sepoys being the native soldiers), the battle of Lucknow rages, Mar. 9-16. The British win, and in June, British victory at Gwalior effectively ends the Mutiny. Harsh reprisals against mutineers follow. Flashman, of course, was there; disguised as an Indian cavalryman he becomes caught up on the wrong side of the Indian Mutiny! [3] [4] [5]
1888 — United States of America: "Blizzard of `88," ushered in by an official New York Weather Bureau forecast of "clearing and colder preceded by light snow," killed 200 in New York state and nearly 600 in surrounding states. 21 inches of snow dumped on NY, 70 mph gusts piled up 20 foot drifts, marooning New Yorkers in elevated trains, carriages and office buildings. The storm stalled for a day and a half. In Connecticut and central Massachusetts, 40-50 inches of snow fell. Winds piled up 40 to 50 foot drifts. Houses and trains were buried. From Chesapeake Bay to Nantucket, 200 ships were sunk or severely damaged. "I started out to school and had with me a clothes-line about 25 feet long, with the end tied to our doorbell in the event I could not cross the huge snow drifts to gain the center of the road on Tremont Ave."
1892 — France: Ravachol takes retribution for the Clichy defendants, bombing the homes of the presiding judge (Mar. 11, 1892) and the prosecutor (Mar. 27, 1892). Police in Clichy had attacked a six-man anarchist labor rally. The workers defended themselves with guns and ended up behind bars with long terms of hard labor. [6]
1907 — Bulgarian Premier Nicolas Petkov is slain by an anarchist.
1909 — Maurice Laisant lives. French author, anarchist, antimilitarist. Albert Camus and other libertarians came to his aid when the state brought charges against him for his activities. Son of the anarchist Charles Laisant and brother of the anarchist Albert, grandson of the anarchist Charles Ange Laisant. [7] [8] [9]
1910 — United States of America: Emma Goldman speaks on "The General Strike [of Philadelphia]" in Pittsburgh. The "free" press will not announce her talks in fear that she will prompt a riot.
1911 — Alba de Céspedes lives. Italian author/poet and pioneering feminist, best known for her diary novel Quaderno proibito (1952). A journalist in the 1930s, imprisoned twice by the Mussolini regime. In 1944 Céspedes founded literary magazine Mercurio, publishing works from modern Italian writers, including Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale and Elio Vittorini. [10] [11]
1914 — Novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison lives, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Invisible guy, with a fetish for light bulbs in his once dark basement. Daily Bleed Saint 2004. [12] [13]
1915 — United States of America: Emma Goldman disappointed by the poor attendance at the tenth anniversary of her magazine Mother Earth in New York.
1919 — United States of America: Mollie Steimer, free on appeal for her 15-year sentence for handing out leaflets, is arrested at the Russian People's House on the East 15th Street during a raid by US federal and local police which netted 164 radicals. Charged with inciting to riot, Mollie was held for eight days in the notorious Tombs prison before being released on $1000 bail, only to be arrested again and taken to Ellis Island for deportation. Locked up for 20 hours a day in the Land of Freedom, denied exercise and fresh air and the right to mingle with other political prisoners, she went on a hunger strike until authorities met her demands. "The entire machinery of the United States government was being employed to crush this slip of a girl weighing no less than eighty pounds," Emma Goldman complained. Among Emmaʼs closest comrades were Mollie Steimer and Senya Fléchine, who also left Soviet Russia after conditions there became intolerable for anarchists. On Mollie Steimer, see Marsh, Anarchist Women, Avrich, Anarchist Portraits; Polenberg, Fighting Faiths; and the pamphlet, Sentenced to Twenty Years Prison (New York: Political Prisoners Defense and Relief Committee, 1919). See also the memorial volume edited by Abe Bluestein, Fighters for Anarchism: Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin ([New York]: Libertarian Publications Group, 1983). [14] [15] [16]
1920 — Poet, novelist, editor of The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945—1980, D.J. Enright lives, Leamington, Warwickshire, England.
1921 — Russia: The paper Izvestia n°9 of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the Sailors, Workers and Soldiers of Kronstadt, notes: " We sent out a call to all the workers of Russia to fight for freely elected Soviets. Our cry was heard. Already, the revolutionary sailors, workers and soldiers of Petrograd are coming to lend us a strong hand." [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
1922 — Turkey: Cornelius Castoriadis lives (1922—1997), Istanbul. Aka Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan. Radical polotical philosopher, social critic and editor of the Journal Socialism or Barbarism (1949—1967). Castoriadis was an activist in the extreme left of the Trotskyist movement before moving to France, where he formed the Socialism or Barbarism group in 1948 with Lefort and Lyotard. "Now, the SI ", Situationist International 1964
1926 — England: George Lansbury proposes in Parliament abolition of Royal Navy.
1930 — India: Gandhiʼs Salt March begins, from Ahmadabad to Delhi, in protest against salt tax.
1931 — Rupert Murdoch, Australian media magnate, lives.
1932 — Poland: The second leg of Emma Goldmanʼs tour begins with two successful meetings (March 11-12) in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) — a lecture to FAUD (Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands) members on the American labor movement and a public meeting of the Gilde freiheitlicher Bücherfreunde. [22]
1935 — United States of America: The trial of prolific child murderer and incorrigible sexual deviate Albert Fish begins. Charged for murdering and eating 10-yr. old Grace Budd; he ends convicted and executed, White Plains, New York.
1937 — Spain: Ideas calls for the dismissal of Aiguadé. [23]
1937 — Macbeth Mine explodes — again — this time killing 18 workers at the Hutchinson Coal Company mine in Logan County, West Virginia. As a March rain fell, scenes from September past were being replayed. Ten men were killed then. Some of the men who helped carry out bodies in the first explosion were now mangled corpses in the same entries they had trudged over bearing stretchers. [24]
1937 — Gudell notifies Emma Goldman (in England) of the establishment of a new committee composed of members from the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo and the FAI to handle all foreign propaganda matters, in order to alleviate inefficiency caused by the personal and political rivalry between Augustin Souchy and Helmut Rudiger (aka M. Dashar) over propaganda.
1950 — Cuba: Beginning of the The Third National Libertarian Congress (March 11-22) "to reorganize the libertarian labor movement and adopt concrete practical measures, enabling its militants to reorient themselves and to play a decisive part in the regeneration of the Cuban labor movement."
1950 — United States of America: American Airlines TWU maintenance workers win 11-day nationwide strike, gaining first severance pay clause in industry and limits on subcontracting.
1952 — Douglas Adams, English author, lives. Patron of Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Save the Rhino International Died, aged 49, in March 2001. Donʼt Panic!
1953 — United States of America: An American B-47 accidentally drops a nuclear bomb on South Carolina, the bomb doesnʼt go off due to 6 safety catches.
1954 — United States of America: Army charges Senator Tail Gunner Joseph McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn, with using threats in trying to get preferred treatment for Private G. David Schine. Robert Kennedy has left McCarthyʼs staff by this time. McCarthy and Cohnʼs witch hunting days are about to end.
1958 — United States of America: H-Bomb falls on Mars Bluff, South Carolina; the nuclear device does not detonate, but does leave a crater 35 feet deep.
1959 — "Raisin in the Sun," by Lorraine Hansberry, the first Broadway play by a black woman, opens.
1963 — André Lorulot (1885—1963) dies . French anarchist, lecturer and propagandist. Andre Lorulot, a leading French individualist before World War I and a leading freethinker for half a century. — Nicolas Walter
1965 — United States of America: Nearly 100 civil-rights activists picket the White House, demanding support for equal rights in Alabama. The protest culminates as a dozen picketers march into the presidential mansion and begin a sit-in. After six hours, police arrest the demonstrators. Todayʼs sit-in is one of several massive protests across the country against police and mob actions in Selma, Alabama. Just this year in the city, more than a thousand protesters have gone to jail, state cops have beaten to death an African American youth, white hoodlums have killed a Boston minister, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) has murdered a Detroit housewife, and state trooper attacks have sent over 50 peaceful marchers to the hospital. [25]
1966 — United States of America: Timothy Leary sentenced in Texas to 30 years for trying to cross into Mexico as a tourist with a small amount of marijuana; Leary appeals and gives press interviews.
1968 — "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" earns soul legend Otis Redding his only gold record — three months after his death. [26] [27]
1968 — Poland: Polish students attacked by Communist police in Warsaw. From 8-9 March Warsaw has seen student agitations and protests; today they are joined by workers uprising, as factory workers battle police and militia in downtown Warsaw. Some 4,000 students marched through Warsaw yelling: "Down with the dictatorship." They were demonstrating peacefully, but were attacked and badly beaten by police; workers were agitated by communists to beat "decadent students". [28]
1968 — West Germany: Rudi Dutschke (1940—1979) — a leader of the German Socialist Student League (SDS), who had played an important role in the militant anti-war protests in the winter of 1967-68 — is shot and nearly killed by a Munich house painter carrying with him a clipping about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the wake of this shooting, students carrying red banners and portraits of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the murdered leaders of the German communist uprising of 1919, clashed with police as they assaulted West Berlinʼs City Hall and the fashionable Kurfurstendamm. Similar events shook a dozen other West German cities. http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/biografien/DutschkeRudi/
1968 — During this month Beatster Jack Kerouac travels to Europe with Tony and Nick Sampas, visiting visits Lisbon, Madrid, Geneva, Munich, Stuttgart.
1971 — Puerto Rico: Uprising at the University of Puerto Rico.
1972 — A sentence of 384, 912 years is demanded against postman Gabriel Grandos for failing to deliver 42,768 letters.
1973 — United States of America: FBI agent fatally shot at occupation of Wounded Knee by Oglala Sioux where the formation of independent Oglala Sioux Nation is proclaimed at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. "That women and children were casualties was unfortunate but unavoidable, and most must have been [killed] from Indian bullets…The Indians at Wounded Knee brought their own destruction as surely as any people ever did. Their attack on the troops was as treacherous as any in the history of Indian warfare, and that they were under a strange religious hallucination is only an explanation not an excuse." — excerpts from an official investigation of Wounded Knee initiated at the behest of Congress, written by General E. D. Scott
1976 — United States of America: Cesar Chavez ends 23-day fast for farm workers. [29]
1979 — Ireland: In anti-tax demonstrations 50,000 people march through Dublin, most of calling for a General Strike. An estimated 150,000 or more people march through Dublin on 20 March and other protests occur in 30 towns throughout the country, including a march by 40,000 workers in Cork. [30] [31]
1985 — Russia: Mikhail Gorbachev takes office.
1986 — 1 million days since traditional foundation of Rome, 4/21/753 BC. [32]
1986 — Spain: During fights with the cops, steelworkers in Reinosa surround the Guardia Civil, beat them up, strip them naked, and march them out of town. Source: 'Calendar Riots'
1988 — United States of America: Beginning of 10 days of direct actions at Nevada Test Site which result in over 2,200 arrests, the largest number of arrests at a political protest outside Washington, D.C. in U.S. history. The event is almost completely ignored by mainstream media.
1990 — Chile: General Augusto Pinochet gives up power after 16 years of American government and corporate-supported terror. The democratically elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The country was shattered by the American government and a team of right-wing economists from the University of Chicago (Nobelist Milton J Friedman and Co.), who turned it into an experimental hothouse. Surprisingly, the poor got poorer and the incomes of the rich skyrocketed. "Democracy must occasionally be bathed in blood" — Augusto Pinochet [33] [34] [35] [36]
1991 — United States of America: In LA a citizen videotapes Officer Friendlies beating the crap out of other citizens.
2001 — Mexico: Over 100,000 greet Zapatistas at the conclusion of their 15-day trek to Mexico City in demand for indigenous rights. "It is time for this country to stop being an object of shame dressed in the color of money." — Subcomandante Marcos [37] [38]
2003 — United States of America: House cafeterias change names for 'french fries' and 'french toast'. [39]
2004 — Spain: Religious fanatics blow up crowded railway station in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring over 1,500 others. This is ostensibly for the Spanish governmentʼs involvement in the American war in Iraq.
2005 — Spain: On the one-year anniversary of the Madrid bombing, religious clerics issue a fatwa against Osama bin Laden, head of the al-Qaida movement responsible for the terrorist explosion. The Islamic Commision of Spain, representing the countryʼs 1 million-member Muslim community, calls him an apostate and urges Muslims to denounce him.
