Beyond Rivalry

It was 90 years ago today that the fighting of World War I between the Allies and Germany ceased, on 11 a.m. on 11 Nov. 1918 -- now variously commemorated as Veteran's Day (U.S. only), Armistice Day, Poppy Day, and Remembrance Day. The Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war (and some would say laid the ground for the next one) when it was signed the next year in June.

I started thinking about what else was going on in 1918.

NOTABLE EVENTS

The Spanish Flu epidemic, coming in waves from 4 March 1918 to June 1920, infecting from 500 to 950 million people worldwide and killing 20 to 100 million people,  likely quite a bit more than the number of people killed in World War I (8.5-10 million combatants plus about 10 million civilians, mainly of famine and illness other than the flu). The Spanish Flu was unusual in that it killed healthy adults (average age: 33) and spread even to the Arctic. It seems to have started in the U.S. state of Kansas.

The Sedition Act was passed in the U.S. at the behest of Pres. Woodrow Wilson and "forbade Americans to use 'disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language' about the United States government, flag, or armed forces during war." Under the act, members of the Industrial Workers of the World union (U.S. citizens) were imprisoned during World War I. Wikipedia says that in his book The Great Influenza, John Barry claims "that the reason there is so little information available today about the 1918 influenza pandemic is that the newspapers supported the act. The information might have lowered the morale of the civilians supporting the war effort and the morale of the troops fighting the war." The Sedition Act was repealed by Congress in 1920.

The UK allowed women over age 30 to vote and widened suffrage generally in Feb. 1918 "by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men [over 21] and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications." The tripled the electorate from 7.7 million people to over 21 million. In December, Constance Markiewicz was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons. Women under 30 were not allowed to vote until 1928. (U.S. women gained the right to vote through the 19th Amendment, ratified in Aug. 1920.)

The Russian royal Romanov family was shot to death on 16 July at Yekaterinburg by order of the Bolsheviks. This included Nicholas II and Aleksandra, their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia, and their son Alexis.

Lynching of black Americans continued in the U.S. South. In May, 8-months-pregnant Mary Turner was horrifically killed for opposing her husband's lynching: "She was taken from her home by a mob of several hundred, had her ankles tied, was hung upside down from a tree, doused in gasoline and motor oil and set on fire.  Whilst still alive, a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife, and the unborn child fell to ground, where it was repeatedly stomped on and crushed. Finally, Turner's body was riddled with bullets. After the incident, the Associated Press wrote that Mary Turner had made unwise remarks about the execution of her husband."

At the time of Finland's independence from Russian in late 1917, that country passed its Mosaic Confessors act, which went into effect in Jan. 1918 and which for the first time allowed Jews living in Finland to become Finnish nationals with full rights of citizens, and Jews who weren't Finns were to be treated like any other foreigner. Finland was engaged in civil war for the first part of 1918, between the socialists Reds (supported by Bolshevist Russia) and the non-socialist whites (supported by Germany); and when the Finnish Air Force was founded in March, the "blue swastika is adopted as its symbol as a tribute to the Swedish explorer and aviator Eric von Rosen, who donated the first plane. Von Rosen had painted the Buddhist symbol on the plane as his personal lucky insignia."

In Feb. 1918, Russia switched from the Julian calendar (which had essentially been in force since 45 B.C.) to the Gregorian calendar, and 1 Feb suddenly became 14 Feb.  Even stranger than daylight savings time, though only a one-time event. Speaking of DST, it first went into effect in the U.S. in March 1918, as did U.S. time zones!

Max Planck of Germany won the Nobel Prize for physics for his quantum theory of light.

Regular U.S. airmail service started in May 1918, among New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Forbes magazine produced its first Richest Americans list. The combined wealth of the 30 richest Americans was $3.7 billion. In 2007, the top 30 of the Forbes 400 were worth about $541 billlion.

The Raggedy Ann doll was introduced for sale in the U.S., based on a prototype produced to promote sales of the first book of Raggedy Ann stories, written by Johnny Gruelle.

Rinso, the world's first granulated laundry soap, was introduced by Lever Brothers.

On 11 Sept 1918, the Boston Red Sox defeated the Chicago Cubs for the World Series championship, their last World Series win until 2004.

U.S. Disasters:

• 9 July: The great train wreck of 1918 (two trains collided) in Nashville, Tennessee kills 101. (Other reports say 99 killed and 171 injured)
  
• 12 Oct.: The Cloquet Fire killed 453 people in the city of Cloquet, Minnesota and nearby.
  
• 25 Oct.: The Princess Sophia sank on a reef near Juneau, Alaska and 353 people died in the "greatest maritime disaster in the Pacific Northwest."
• 1 Nov.: The Malbone Street Wreck, which was "the worst rapid transit accident in world history," occured in Brooklyn approaching the new Prospect Park subway station, killing 97 and injuring 100 people.

BIRTHS

Jan: Gamal Abdel Nasser, pres. of Egypt 1956-1970; Oral Roberts, evangelist; Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romanian dictator

Feb: Muriel Spark, Scottish novelist (Prime of Miss Jean Brodie); Joey Bishop, American entertainer; Don Pardo (SNL announcer); Bobby Riggs, tennis player

March: Mickey Spillane, American writer; Howard Cosell, sports journalist; Pearl Bailey, singer and actress; Sam Walton of Wal-Mart

April: Betty Ford, first lady; William Holden, actor.

May: Jack Paar, American TV host; Mike Wallace (60 Minutes); Julius Rosenberg, American-born Soviet spy

June:

July: Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, advice columnists; Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director; Nelson Mandela, pres. South Africa

August: Leonard Bernstein, American composer and conductor; Ted Williams, American baseball player

Sept.: Paul Harvey, American radio broadcaster

Oct.: Rita Hayworth, American actress

Nov.: Art Carney, American actor (The Honeymooners); Billy Graham, American evangelist; Spiro Agnew, American VP

Dec.: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer; Kurt Waldheim, Austrian president and Secretary-General of the UN; Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt; Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of Germany 1974-1982

DEATHS

Gustav Klimt, Austrian painter (b. 1862); Claude Debussy, French composer (b. 1862); Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron), German World War I pilot (b. 1892); Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (b. 1868) and his family, in the Russian Revolution; Stanley Steamer co-inventor Francis E. Stanley (in an auto accident) (b.1849); Joyce Kilmer poet (Trees) (b. 1886); tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds (b.1850); Wilfred Owen, English poet (killed in action) (b. 1893); Edmond Rostand, playwright (Cyrano de Bergerac) (b.1868);  Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet (b. 1880)

Deep Glamour has a provocative post about the relationships among glamour, heroism, martyrdom, desire, violence, and terror.

It begins by quoting author Salman Rushdie, who, when asked about the causes of terrorism, suggested: "a misconceived sense of mission," a 'herd mentality,' the desire to become 'a historic figure,' an attraction to violence, and -- shocking the interviewer -- glamour. ... 'The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other peoples lives.'"

Blogger Virginia Postrel continues:

"To someone who thinks 'glamour' means movie stars and designer dresses, the idea that terrorism is glamorous sounds bizarre. But Rushdie is wise to the deeper meaning of glamour, as a form of magic and persuasion. Glamour is in the audience's eyes, and the phenomenon long preceded Hollywood. ... Glamour can sell religious devotion or military glory as surely as it can pitch lipstick or island vacations. All promise a way to transcend our everyday circumstances, to experience more and become better than ordinary life allows.  All invite us to imagine escape and transformation. ... Glamour appeals to our desires, whatever they may be."

Glamour, in other words, has something in common with the sacred, as Alison talks about it in his Nov. 2001 essay "Contemplation in a world of violence: Girard, Merton, Tolle":

"[T]he old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. ... In short, there had appeared, suddenly, a holy day. Not what we mean by a holiday, a day of rest, but an older form of holiday, a being sucked out of our ordinary lives in order to participate in a sacred and sacrificial centre so kindly set up for us by the meaningless suicides. ... Quickly people were saying things like 'to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about the things that really matter.'  ... What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity."

Postrel ends her post by asking, on September 11, "How do we puncture the glamour of Jihadi terrorism?" She answers with: "The first step is recognizing that such glamour exists."

David W. Dunlap at the NYT (The Towers of Memory, Before and After) compares views from 1978 and 2008.

(Photo credit: Dunlap/NYT)

Tomorrow it will be 75 years since Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took office in Germany.  Nicholas Kulish writes today in the NYT about the continuing struggle of the German people to come to terms with the Holocaust in their country, including "the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace" that " continues unabated," with new construction beginning in Berlin of two monuments, "one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, ...; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust." These are in addition to the recently opened "Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters" and "a huge new exhibition ... at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp," as well as other building projects recently launched or in the works.

Two points that interest me in Kulish's short article (both mentioned briefly and warranting further investigation):

The younger generation of Germans, "who are required to study the Nazi era and the Holocaust intensively," view the Holocaust not as a source of guilt but as motivation for them to be responsible "on the world stage for social justice and pacifism, including opposition to the war in Iraq."

If this is true, it makes me curious about opposition to the Iraq war by those who are steeped in Holocaust history and likely aware of their own families' complicity in it or victimisation by it. Some people see Saddam Hussein as Hitler writ small, merrily exterminating his own people; I wonder what course these young people think would have been best in the case of Iraq, considering their own history: don't interefere, use diplomacy, use another strategy?  Second, on the same point, because many people consider WWII a 'just war,' one that needed to be fought if any war ever did, I also wonder how the younger generation arrives at a position of pacifism generally.   

The second comment that I noticed was Susan Neiman's, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, an international public research group. She worries that the young will eventually "express their exhaustion with the topic. 'I can't help but feeling that some of the continued, "Let's build monuments; let's build Jewish museums," is a fairly ritualized behavior. ... I worry terribly that it's going to backfire.'"

This framing as 'ritual' of the construction of reminder after reminder of a terrible act reminds me of some of James Alison's thoughts about the sacred centre in his article after the events of 9/11/2001. The sacred centre offers those of us not actually involved in the crisis itself a sense of transcendent meaning, of good clean purpose, in lives that are often cluttered with the banal and with "little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences." The sacrificial centre is invoked to generate a feeling of unanimity, which can then harden to become militant goodness, and so on; and which can resemble, not in intent but perhaps in outcome, the technique well-understood and effectively and terribly used by the Nazis themselves, of bringing people together for a 'great purpose,' which often and seamlessly leads to opposing and scapegoating those who won't come together for the 'great purpose,' to creating the belief that this is thing that really matters, to instilling fear in those who refuse to believe it. Humans seem prone to being, as Alison puts it, "sucked into" the sacred centre. It makes us feel good.

Or, maybe, this younger generation won't so much become exhausted by participating in (or being expected to participate in) the sacred centre as they will come to see the buildings and the history as a reminder of something ... ordinary. Not transcendent, not filled with purpose and meaning, but very ordinary, and as some may already understand in their pacifism, very capable of being re-enacted any time, any where.

In memory and honour of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929 -1968 ...

MLK Quotes

MLK Bio Sketch

MLK Birthday Commemoration Resources

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It's not only necessary to know how to go about loving your enemies, but also to go down into the question of why we should love our enemies. I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus' thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that's the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. -- 17 November 1957, "Loving Your Enemies," sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL

There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. ... For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does. -- 17 November 1957, "Loving Your Enemies," sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL

For nonviolence not only calls upon its adherents to avoid external physical violence, but it calls upon them to avoid internal violence of spirit. It calls on them to engage in that something called love. And I know it is difficult sometimes. When I say 'love' at this point, I'm not talking about an affectionate emotion. It's nonsense to urge people, oppressed people, to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. I'm talking about something much deeper. I'm talking about a sort of understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. -- Speech at the Great March on Detroit, 23 June 1963, Detroit, MI

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. ... The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. -- Strength To Love, 1963

I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. -- "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?," Annual Report Delivered at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 16 Aug. 1967, Atlanta, GA

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Biographical Sketch

King was born on 15 January 1929 at the family home in Atlanta, Georgia. He entered Morehouse College at age 15, graduating in 1948 with a B.A. in Sociology. He was ordained in Feb. 1948 (at age 19) at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, soon becoming assistant pastor of that church. He received his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, PA, in 1951, after which he accepted the call of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he served as pastor from Sept. 1954 to Nov. 1959. In September 1951, King began doctoral studies in Systematic Theology at Boston University and studied at Harvard University as well. In June 1953, he married Coretta Scott of Marion, Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in June 1955. His dissertation was titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” In 1959, he and the family moved to Atlanta to direct the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (which he helped found in 1957), and from 1960 until his death, he co-pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father.

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise, born 17 Nov. 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama; Martin Luther III, born 23 Oct. 1957 in Montgomery; Dexter Scott, born 30 Jan. 1961 in Atlanta, Georgia; and Bernice Albertine, born 28 March 1963 in Atlanta.

King authored six books: Stride Toward Freedom (1958), about the Montgomery bus boycott; The Measure of a Man (1959), sermons; Why We Can't Wait (1963), about the Birmingham campaign; Strength to Love (1963), more sermons; Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), "reflections on the problems of today's world, the nuclear arms race, etc.;" and, posthumously published, The Trumpet of Conscience (1968), lectures.

King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. He was there to help lead sanitation workers in a protest against low wages and poor working conditions. Though James Earl Ray was arrested, convicted, and pled guilty to the crime, a jury in Memphis in 1999, deciding in a case brought by King's wife and children, concluded "that Loyd Jowers and governmental agencies including the City of Memphis, the State of Tennessee, and the federal government were party to the conspiracy to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."

King's mother, Alberta Williams King, "was shot and killed as she sat at the organ in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta" on Sunday, 30 June 1974 by Marcus Wayne Chenault, a 23-year-old black man from Ohio who said he shot her because "all Christians are my enemies."

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MLK Birthday Resources

Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project (Stanford University) Biography, a very detailed MLK Jr. Chronology, eleven MLK Jr. speeches, eleven MLK Jr. sermons, and information on articles, papers, more. Includes pdf-formatted text of the Letter From Birmingham Jail (16 April 1963), the Address at March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (the "I Have a Dream" speech, 28 August 1963), his Acceptance Speech at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony (10 December 1964), Beyond Vietnam (4 April 1967), and the "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech (3 April 1968, his last speech). Very slow loading.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (Seattle Times), an extensive resource on King, with sections on The Man, The Movement, The Legacy, The Holiday, Electronic Classroom, and Talking About It.

The King Center, whose sections include Welcome, History, Philosophy (a collection of quotes from various King sources), Words, King Holiday, Community, Children, News, and Shop. Not as much information here as in other resources.

Time 100: Leaders & Revolutionaries: Martin Luther King, Jr. (Time magazine), a three-page profile of King, with accompanying timeline and a sidebar entitled "What if King had lived?"

"Loving Your Enemies" speech, delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957.   

I Have A Dream" Speech (28 August 1963) text. Also available in audio mp3 format.

Robert Kennedy's Speech on MLK Jr.'s Death (4 April 1968) text (at History Place), and in RealAudio.

King's Legacy: PBS NewsHour Talk with Taylor Branch (PBS), the transcript of David Gergen interview with MLK Jr.-biographer Taylor Branch about King's most important legacies, from 2 Feb. 1998.

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV (FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), an article on MLK's largely unnoted shift from civil rights issues to human rights issues during the last three years of his life, by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, in Jan. 1995 Media Beat.

Note: The source for most of the biographical sketch is The King Center Biographical Outline of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Strangely compelling, the Axis of Evel Knievel ("Another Day, Another Pointless Atrocity") posts details of an historical atrocity most days. Among 'evel' topics are crime, executions, nuclear radiation accidents, birthdays of tyrants and dictators, fires, declaratons of war, war battles, shipwrecks, genocides and other mass slaughters, governmental conspiracies, self-immolation, and so on.

26 MAY is ...

>>> 15 years since Chuck Geschke (1939-), the co-founder of Adobe Systems Inc., was kidnapped at gunpoint from the Adobe parking lot in Mountain View, California (1992) as he arrived at work around 9 a.m.  He was held for four days before being rescued from a house in Hollister, California by the FBI. Geschke retired as president of Adobe in 2000.

Sources: Los Altos Town Crier: Part 1 of  A dramatic kidnapping revisited, by Anne Chappell Belden, Oct. 1997: "An exhaustive overview of the five-day ordeal, what has transpired since and the ramifications on the Geschke family."  Subsequent articles: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 / Today in Technology History: May 30 /  Geschke's bio at Adobe's website /  

25 MAY is ...

>>> 72 years since George 'Babe' Ruth (1895-1948) hit his record-setting 714th home run (1935), playing with the Boston Braves at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. He went 4-for-4, drove in 6 runs and hit 3 home runs in an 11-7 loss to the Pirates. The last home run cleared the roof at the old Forbes Field. His record stood for 39 years, until Hank Aaron broke it in Atlanta in April 1974, amid death threats and racist hate mail "from people who did not want to see a black man break Ruth's home run record."

Sources: Yesterday's News (Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune): Bambino's Last Home Run / The Official Site of the NY Yankees: The Sultan of Swat / ESPN: Lovable Ruth was Everyone's Babe, by Larry Schwartz / Smithsonian: Breaking Records, Breaking Barriers / BabeRuth.com / The Nation: Bonding with the Babe, by Dave Zirin, May 2006

>>> 486 years since the Edict of Worms was issued by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1521), "declaring [church reformer] Martin Luther an outlaw, banning his writings, and requiring his arrest: 'We want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic'." Anyone was permitted to kill Luther without legal consequence. The Diet of Worms (Reichstag zu Worms) was a general assembly that took place in Worms, in what is now Germany, from January to May 1521. Other issues were dealt with, but this is the one remembered. In April, Luther was brought before the Diet to renounce or reaffirm his views. He took a day to think about it and then came back to essentially reaffirm his views: 'Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason  -- I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other --  my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe." On this date, Charles issued the Edict (antedated to 8 May) asking for Luther's arrest and punishment. Prince Frederick 'kidnapped' Luther on his way home from the Diet and hid him in Wartburg Castle to protect him from otherwise inevitable arrest and execution. When Luther finally emerged from hiding, the emperor was preoccupied and public support for him was growing, so the Edict was not enforced and Luther continued to call for reform until his death in 1546. (Photo of Statue of Luther at Worms, from Gutenberg)

Sources: Martin Luther: Excerpts from his account of the confrontation at the Diet of Worms / Wikipedia: Diet of Worms / BBC Radio 4: The Diet of Worms (audio programme) /  Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms, at Luther.de 

(Special Note: If you do a Google search, you will learn that a 'diet of worms' is also good for bowel cancer, MS, and winning marathons.)

24 MAY is ...

>>> 151 years since American slavery abolitionist John Brown (1800 - 1859) staged his first anti-slavery raid, on Pottawatomie, Kansas (1856). "His perennial zeal for the underdog ... drove him to struggle on behalf of the economically vulnerable farmers of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and western Virginia a decade before his guerrilla activities in Kansas."  In late winter of 1856, Brown came from his home in Pennsylvania to Kansas, which was hotly divided on the slavery issue. Slave state forces were using violence and terrorism to win the state for their side in an upcoming vote, which inflamed Brown, as did the lack of effective response by free state forces. Brown was also concerned that his family could be the next targets of the terrorists. During the night of 24 May, Brown and a group of others, including some of his sons, took five pro-slavery settlers -- James Doyle, James Doyle's sons William and Drury Doyle, Allen Wilkinson, and William Sherman -- from their cabins on Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with broadswords. He evaded capture in the woods. "This was one of the many bloody episodes in Kansas preceding the American Civil War, which came to be known collectively as Bleeding Kansas." Brown's undoing came in 1859, with this raid on Harpers Ferry, WV (then Virginia). He hoped to start a liberation movement among enslaved blacks and to deplete Virginia of slaves, wreaking economic havoc, but no slaves answered his call. In October, with a group of anti-slavery advocates gathered, he went ahead with his raid on the Harper's Ferry Armory. Gunfire lasted all day, until by morning the Marines surrounded them. Brown's group killed 4 people, including a free black man, and his opponents killed 10 of Brown's men, including two of Brown's sons. He was tried, and hanged on 2 December in public, believing himself (and many others agreed) to be a martyr.

Sources: PBS: The American Experience: Pottawatomie Massacre / The Pottawatomie Killings -- It is Established Beyond Controversy That John Brown Was the Leader. Statement of James Townsley. In the Republican Citizen, Paola, Kansas, 20 Dec 1879 / The Trial of John Brown: A Commentary, by Douglas O. Linder, 2005 / Wikipedia: John Brown and Wikipedia: Pottawatomie Massacre / John Brown and the Pottawatomie Killings, sourced from To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown, by Stephen B. Oates, 1970 / 

23 MAY is ...

>>> 509 years since Girolamo Savonarola (1452 - 1498), aka Jerome or Hieronymus Savonarola, an Italian Dominican priest and leader of Florence, was executed by the state (1498). He spent most of his career preaching against the corruption of the clergy and averred that Christian life involved being good, not accomplishing pompous displays. He hoped to correct the excesses of the church and purge it of immorality and depravity. One of his favourite topics was the Last Days, and he was very popular and influential with the people because of a confluence of current events that made it seem that the last days might really be at hand. He was "venerated by his followers as a prophet." When he replaced Lorenzo Medici as the leader of Florence in 1494, he established what he called a 'Christian and religious Republic,' one whose first acts was to make sodomy a capital offence. His 'Bonfire of the Vanities' in Feb. 1497 was a collection and subsequent burning of "items associated with moral laxity" such as mirrors, cosmetics, pagan books, playing cards, games and chess pieces, musical instruments, finery, and Renaissance artworks. Eventually the citizenry got tired of him, as the last days didn't manifest, and there was rioting and revolt against him, with taverns and gambling establishments re-opened. Savonarola was excommunicated in May 1497 by Pope Alexander VI (though Savonarola continued to celebrate Mass in defiance) and arrested by him in 1498, charged with "heresy, uttering prophecies, sedition, and religious error." He and two associates, brothers Domenico and Silvestro, were tortured on the rack and signed confessions ("the torturers spared only Savonarola’s right arm, in order that he might be able to sign his confession"). He and his associates were given over by the church to secular authorities to be hung on a gallows and then burned. 

Sources: Catholic Encyclopedia / NNDB /  Wikipedia /  The History Guide (with brief bibliography) / Church History Institute /  A Brief History of the Apocalypse / see also: The Burning of the Vanities: Savonarola and the Borgia Pope by Desmond Seward (2006, UK), and Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Italy by Lauro Martines (2007, UK) or Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence by Lauro Martines (2006, U.S.)

>>> 359 years since the Netherlands gained independence from Spain (1648). The country, now a constitutional monarchy, was part of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, under the rule of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, until 1579. The Eighty Years' War between the provinces and Spain began in 1568, and in 1579, the northern half of the Seventeen Provinces declared independence from Spain, forming the Union of Utrecht. Philip II, who followed Charles V, continued warring with them until 1648, when Spain finally recognized Dutch independence. After this, the Netherlands became a major seafaring and economic power in the so-called Dutch Golden Age.

Sources:  Wikipedia / Modern History Sourcebook: The Dutch Declaration of Independence, 1581 / World History at KLMA (Korean Minjok Leadership Academy) : Dutch Revolt