About This Blog
An alternative "On This Day", On This Deity aims to bring light to and celebrate Culture Heroes, Outsider Icons, Beloved Immortals and Revolutionary Events in history.
August
1st August 1917 The Lynching of Frank Little
Ninety-five years ago today at 3.05am in Butte, Montana, six masked men burst into the boarding house room of labour leader Frank Little, pulled him out of his bed, beat him, tied him to the bumper of a car, dragged … Continue reading
2nd August 1943 The Treblinka Revolt
When people wonder how millions of Holocaust victims went to their deaths without resisting, they display a total ignorance of the impeccable organisation, military might and web of deception behind the Nazi’s Final Solution. While there were multiple ghetto uprisings … Continue reading
Posted in Dissent 10 Comments
3rd August 2006 the Death of Arthur Lee
Today we honour Arthur Lee – the African American protest singer, metaphysical poet and leader of LA’s pioneering psychedelic refuseniks Love – who quit this planet six years ago after an arduous battle with cancer. Like Lou Reed, Arthur’s work … Continue reading
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4th August 1948 the Death of Mileva Maric
Sixty-four years ago on this day, Mileva Maric died alone and unknown in Zurich at the age of seventy-two. “Few stories in the history of science are as heartbreaking [as hers],” claimed the New Scientist. A brilliant woman born in … Continue reading
Posted in Heroines 12 Comments
5th August 1895 the Death of Friedrich Engels
Today we recall the social theorist and world-changer – Friedrich Engels – chiefly known as the lifelong friend, literary executor and “junior partner” of Karl Marx. One of the most remarkable collaborative relationships in history, together Engels and Marx wrote The … Continue reading
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6th August 1945 the Bombing of Hiroshima
On 6th August 1945, the United States government unleashed upon the world the first weapon of mass destruction when the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Exploding with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tonnes of … Continue reading
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7th August 1933 the Simele Massacre
“Who, after all, speaks, today, of the extermination of Armenians,” asked Adolf Hitler in 1939. But, then as now, even less speak of the genocide of the Assyrians – the torchbearers of the earliest civilisation – who fell victim to the same … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities 1 Comment
8th August 1897 Michele Angiolillo’s Attentat
One hundred and fifteen years ago today, in the tiny Spanish spa town of Santa Agueda, Spain’s autocratic and much-hated prime minister Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated: gunned down as a final act of revenge by an Italian anarchist who … Continue reading
Posted in Anarchists 4 Comments
9th August 1943 the Death of Franz Jägerstätter
It can be surprising to discover that so thoroughly indoctrinated were the Germans under Hitler’s Nazis that their cruelty towards non-Nazis did not halt abruptly in May 1945, as Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, Hohernzollerns alike awoke from their collective psychosis. Instead … Continue reading
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10th August
With nothing to report today, let us consider the words of President Woodrow Wilson after signing the Federal Reserve into existence: “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by … Continue reading
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11th August 1958 the Dockum Sit-In
Fifty-four years ago today on 11th August 1958, the owner of Kansas’s state-wide Rexall drugstores walked into Dockum’s, his flagship store in downtown Wichita. Observing a group of young black students sitting peacefully at the lunch counter, after several minutes of … Continue reading
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11th August 1881 the Death of Jane Digby
On This Deity today proudly presents a love story of lust and adventure; the story of Jane Elizabeth Digby, who died 131 years ago today, a woman who did her own thing, when doing one’s own thing was very much … Continue reading
12th August 1827 the Death of William Blake
One hundred and eighty-five years ago today, William Blake died as he had lived, in poverty and obscurity. What can we say about this visionary, mystic, prophet, poet, painter, engraver, and World Artist? The criminal neglect that one of the greatest-evers … Continue reading
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13th August 1946 the Death of HG Wells
Today we celebrate the social reformer, prophet and science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, who died on this day aged 79. Probably best remembered for his visionary novels The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, and for his … Continue reading
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14th August
On this August day on which no great act occurred worthy of commemorating as an On This Deity entry, let’s take this opportunity to remind ourselves of the two ancient world tyrants – Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar – both of … Continue reading
15th August 1889 The Meeting of Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman
One hundred and twenty-three years ago today, a fateful and momentous meeting of two exceptional minds occurred in a café in New York City’s Lower East Side. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, or John and Yoko, the reaction between the two … Continue reading
Posted in Anarchists 4 Comments
16th August 1819 The Peterloo Massacre
One hundred and ninety-three years ago today, during a pro-democracy rally in Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field, utter bloody carnage fell upon the peaceful protestors when the local yeomanry set about the crowd of 60,000 with sabres drawn, trampling and hacking … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities, Dissent, World Events 5 Comments
17th August 1963 the Execution of Delgado & Granados
Forty-eight years ago today, two young Spanish anarchists were executed by General Franco’s obscene regime for a Passport Office bombing of which they had no knowledge, while the real perpetrators slipped quietly away. Despite the absence of any evidence of … Continue reading
Posted in Anarchists, Dissent 1 Comment
18th August 1987 the Death of Dambudzo Marechera
Today we remember the extraordinary and explosive life of Dambudzo Marechera, the Zimbabwean ‘enfant terrible of African literature’ who – twenty-five years ago today – died homeless, penniless and sick from AIDS on the streets of Harare, at the age … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 27 Comments
19th August 1936 the Death of Federico Garcia Lorca
Throughout his all too short but trailblazing life, death had been his central artistic theme – and seventy-six years ago today on 19th August 1936 at the age of thirty-eight, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca met the … Continue reading
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20th August 1968 The End of the Prague Spring
An entry on the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring will appear here shortly.
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21st August 1831 Nat Turner’s Rebellion
One hundred and eighty-one years ago today, Nat Turner – a slave and lay preacher from Virginia – calmly explained to six of his fellow slaves that the moment had come for him not only to lead his people out … Continue reading
Posted in Dissent 3 Comments
22nd August 1989 the Death of Huey P. Newton
Twenty-three years ago today, Huey P. Newton – revolutionary, agitator, rhetorician, co-founder and Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party – was shot and killed when a drug deal went wrong. He was forty-seven years old. After his glory … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 9 Comments
23rd August 1927 the Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
Eighty-five years ago today, despite a long campaign of letters and petitions involving such world luminaries as HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Parker and Upton Sinclair, two Italian anarchists died in the electric chair after losing their … Continue reading
Posted in Anarchists 2 Comments
24th August 1770 the Death of Thomas Chatterton
Today we recall the brief, peculiar and tragic life of Thomas Chatterton – English poet, forger of medieval poetry and proto-Romantic – who, aged just seventeen years and nine months old, poisoned himself with arsenic 242 years ago rather than … Continue reading
25th August 1900 the Death of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche died on this day in 1900. But who dares to celebrate the death in an insane asylum of this radical thinker, whose works – admittedly violated, even in places re-written, by his self-serving sister – contributed so much … Continue reading
Posted in Curiosities, Heroes 4 Comments
26th August 1920 American Women Get the Vote
Sisters, ninety-two years ago, the world was still so male dominated that we women were not even allowed to vote. While our most adventurous brothers were becoming heroes of the so-called Free World by flying planes from the USA to … Continue reading
27th August 1963 the Death of W.E.B. Du Bois
Today we recall the extraordinary and accomplished life of W.E.B. Du Bois, the foremost champion of equal rights for blacks in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, who died forty-nine years ago today at the … Continue reading
28th August 1955 the Lynching of Emmett Till
Fifty-seven years ago today, at about 2.30 am on 28th August 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till was kidnapped at gunpoint from his great-uncle’s house in Money, Mississippi. His kidnappers then drove to a disused plantation shed in neighboring Sunflower … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities 47 Comments
29th August 1969 Leila’s First Hijack
Forty-three years ago today, and just twelve months after Women’s Libbers first burned a bra at an Atlantic City protest against inequality, a new kind of World Revolutionary Heroine was born when twenty-five-year-old Leila Khaled of the PFLP (Popular Front … Continue reading
Posted in Heroines 2 Comments
30th August 1918 Fanya Botches It
Ninety-four years ago today, as Vladimir Lenin left a factory where he’d just delivered a speech to workers, a female revolutionary by the name of Fanya Kaplan – disillusioned by the manner in which Lenin had assumed dictatorial powers and … Continue reading
31st August
No great action has thus far occurred on this day that warrants an On This Deity entry. Budding politicos and future revolutionaries please therefore take note of 31st August for all potential world-changing international incidents.
Posted in Uncategorized 2 Comments