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1178 Some monks at Canterbury, England reported having seen an explosion on the moon.

1508 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor was defeated in Friulia by Venetian forces; he was forced to sign a three-year truce and cede several territories to Venice.

1513 Italian Wars: Battle of Novara. Swiss troops defeated the French under Louis de la Tremoille, forcing the French to abandon Milan. Duke Massimiliano Sforza was restored.

1523 Gustav Vasa was elected King of Sweden, marking the end of the Kalmar Union.

1638 A football match on Burnt Fen, England, was the guise for rioters from Ely and Lakenheath to assemble and destroy the drainage ditches. The rioters were protesting enclosure, whereby wealthy landowners enclosed lands formerly considered de facto as public property for agriculture and animal husbandry. By the end of the 19^th Century the process of enclosure was largely complete.

"Littleport seems to have been a rebellious village in earlier times. In June 1638 the Justice of the Peace for the Isle reported that '40 or 50 men gathered in a fen called Whelpmore, near Littleport … and that their assembly was appointed to throw down ditches which the drainers had made for enclosing their fen ground from the common, which was left to the inhabitants …' In the same month Sir Miles Sandys of Wilburton was writing to his son at Court describing the tumults and disturbances, and declaring that 'If order not be taken it will turn out to be a general rebellion in the fen towns'. There was for example 'A great riot made at Wickham whilst writing word is brought to me by my Lord of Bedford's workmen, that the country rose up against him both in Coveney and Littleport, by example of the Wickham men'

"In more recent times there is the 'Littleport Riots' which started on the night of May 22nd 1816 at the Globe Inn. Between 50 and 60 men were present and the talk was of the high prices of wheat and bread."   Source

1683 Elias Ashmole (1617 - 1692), English antiquarian, collector, politician and student of astrology, and alchemy, opened the first public museum, the Ashmolean, in Oxford, UK.

The museum, in Oxford, England is the world's first and oldest university museum. It was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built in 1678 - 1683 to house the collection of curiosities Ashmole gave Oxford University in 1677 – the ones he had collected himself as well as those he had inherited from the travellers John Tradescant, father and son. The collection included antique coins, books, engravings, geological specimens, and zoological specimens – one of which was the stuffed body of the last dodo ever seen in Europe, but by 1755 it was so moth-eaten it was destroyed, except for its head and one claw.

1760 The transit of Venus over the Sun. Transits of Venus are rare, coming in pairs, 8 years apart, separated by approximately 120 years. The next such transit, on June 3, 1769, was observed at Tahiti by a party led by legendary mariner Captain James Cook (1728 - '79), on a voyage on which Cook claimed the continent of Australia in the name of King George III of Britain.

History of Venus transits   Venus Transit: Cycles of the Heart    Viewing Venus in broad daylight

James Cook and the transit of Venus    transitofvenus.org    More    More

1778 Debtors' prisons were abolished in the US; debtors, however, continued to flourish.

1790 British colony of New South Wales: The first convict ship for females, and the first ship of the second fleet, the Lady Juliana, arrived at Port Jackson ( Sydney Harbour) . Lady Juliana carried 221 females, five having died on the arduous voyage to Sydney Town.

"In 1822, John Nicol, a mariner who served on the Lady Juliana when that vessel was reserved for women prisoners, published his reminiscences. His journal in illuminating: 'The Lady Juliana carried 245 female convicts. Amongst these was Mrs. Barnsley, a noted sharper and shop-lifter who openly boasted that for a century her family had been swindlers and highwaymen. Indeed, her brother, a highwayman, as well-dressed and genteel in his appearance as any gentleman, came to farewell her on board before we sailed from Portsmouth. Other notorious women in our company were Mrs. Davis, swindler and fence, and Mary Williams, receiver of stolen goods, who had spent a long time in Newgate prison'. Then there was Nelly Kerwin, 'a female of daring habits' who had specialised in impersonating the wives of various sailors and drawing their pay envelopes. Her sentence was transportation for the rest of her natural life. Nicol pens vivid impression of various other members of the convict cargo (the need for which he explains quite simply - 'the colony at that time being in great want of women'), including the 'pretty well-behaved girl who was rumoured to be the illegitimate daughter of a British Prime Minister. He records the tragedy surrounding the lives of some of the young women convicts. There were, for example, Sarah Dorset, Mary Rose, and a young Scots girl who moved him deeply. The latter, obviously cultured, kept to herself all the time the Lady Juliana lay in harbour. Nicol often saw her crying to herself but he never learned her story. 'The poor young Scots girl I have never yet got out of my mind', he wrote years later. 'She died, probably of a broken heart, before the transport sailed. She was young and beautiful even in convict dress, but pale as death, and her eyes red from weeping'.

"Most of the women, in Nicol's opinion, were 'harmless, unfortunate creatures, the victims of the basest seduction'."
Source: Wild Wild Women

"Suprisingly [sic], during the voyage only five convicts died. Rations were properly issued, the vessel kept clean and fumigated, the women were given free access to the deck, and supplies of fresh food were obtained at the ports of call."
The Floating Brothel

Review of The Floating Brothel (novel)

1799 Death of Patrick Henry (b. 1736), US Quaker lawyer and patriot, who spoke the famous words "Give me liberty or give me death" (March 23, 1775)

1809 Sweden promulgated the Constitution of 1809.

1813 The US invasion of Canada was halted at Stoney Creek, Ontario.

1815 The London Peace Society was formed.

1830 Catherine Laboure saw an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Paris seminary of the Sisters of Charity.

1832 Jeremy Bentham (b. 1748) died, London. Utilitarian philosopher, founder of the Westminster Review, his skeleton, dressed and seated in a sedan chair, is still preserved and on display at University College which he founded.

Blame Bentham for office design?

1833 President Andrew Jackson became the first President of the USA to travel in a train.

1844 The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) was founded in London.

1857 Sophia of Nassau married the future King Oscar II of Sweden-Norway.  

Moreton Bay Settlement, NSW, drawn by Henry Boucher Bowerman in 1835.
The Convict Barracks are the gabled buildings in the left middle ground.

1859 Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom signed Letters Patent making Queensland, Australia, into a separate colony. In 1901 with Australian federation, it became a state.

Queensland, formerly the penal colony of Moreton Bay District, was granted separation from the British colony of New South Wales as a new state, with Brisbane as its capital city. Consequently, today is Queensland Day.

Founded on September 2, 1824 by John Oxley, Moreton Bay had a reputation as one of the cruellest penal settlements in the British Empire, especially under Captain Patrick Logan, inspiring an unknown balladeer to compose the folk song, 'Moreton Bay' (see below). On September 10, 1825 the settlement, in what was then known as New South Wales, was formally called Brisbane, and on May 4, 1842, Moreton Bay proper was declared a free settlement. It was mainly in Queensland that the Shearers' Strike of 1891 led to the formation of the Labor Party and the world's first workers' party government.

As at June 30, 2003 the State's population was 3,796,800 and Brisbane's 1,733,200. A resident of Brisbane is popularly known as a "Brisbanite." Ironic but affectionate nicknames for the city include 'Bris Vegas' and 'Brisneyland'.

The largest city by area in the world, Mount Isa, is located in Queensland, with a city area is in excess of 40,000 km². Queensland is home to the Whitsunday Islands, the Wet Tropics and the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef. Moreton Bay itself, near Brisbane, is a popular venue for whale watching. Then, of course, is the mighty Moreton Bay Fig, abundant wildlife, including dolphins, dugong, sharks and turtles ...

 

'Moreton Bay'

Traditional Australian folksong

One Sunday morning as I went walking
By Brisbane Waters I chanced to stray
I heard a convict his fate bewailing
As on the sunny river bank I lay: –

"I am a native of Erin's island
But lately banished from my native shore
They tore me from my aged parents
And from the maiden whom I do adore.

"I've been a prisoner at Port Macquarie
At Norfolk Island and Emu Plains
At Castle Hill and at cursed Toongabbie
At all these settlements I've worked in chains.

"But of all the places of condemnation
And penal stations of New South Wales
To Moreton Bay I have found no equal
Excessive tyranny each day prevails.

"For three long years I was beastly treated
And heavy irons on my legs I wore
My back from flogging was lacerated
And oft times painted with my crimson gore.

"And many a man from downright starvation
Lies mouldering now underneath the clay
And Captain Logan he had us mangled
At the triangles of Moreton Bay.

"Like the Egyptians and ancient Hebrews
We were oppressed under Logan's yoke
Till a native black lying there in ambush
Did deal our tyrant his mortal stroke.

"My fellow prisoners be exhilarated
That all such monsters such a death may find
And when from bondage we are liberated
Our former sufferings will fade from mind."

(The tune is the Irish ballad, 'Boolavogue' (P J McCall), commemorating the Irish Rebellion of 1798.)
 

 

Aborigines at Moreton Bay    Convict songs collected by Warren Fahey    Battle of Vinegar Hill, NSW

1862 American Civil War: The Union captured Memphis, Tennessee.

1882 More than 100,000 inhabitants of Bombay were killed as a cyclone in the Arabian Sea pushed huge waves into the harbour.

1882 The electric iron was patented.

1884 The world's first roller coaster opened, Coney Island, New York City.

1912 The eruption of Novarupta in Alaska began, perhaps the second largest volcanic eruption in historic time.

1913 Australia: Construction began on the Prince's Highway, which eventually linked Sydney and Melbourne.

1918 World War I: The Battle of Belleau Wood began.

1925 The Chrysler Corporation was founded.

1933 The first drive-in theatre was opened by Richard Hollingshead in Camden, New Jersey.

1936 The first issue of Peace News was published in England. Still publishing today, it promotes pacifist publishing, as well as War Resisters' International (WRI; founded in 1921 under the name 'Paco'), a network of anti-militarist organisations in more than 30 countries. WRI publishes another journal, The Broken Rifle.

1942 World War II: Nazis burned the Czech village of Lidice as reprisal for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich.

1944 World War II: D-Day: Operation Overlord opened the Battle of Normandy.

D-Day: the biggest invasion in world history began – more than one million men from 4,000 ships landed on beaches in northern France, beaches codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. The day had been set for June 5, but was postponed due to impossible weather conditions.

It was a coincidence, officer ... honest!

Poor old Leonard Sidney Dawe. All the English schoolmaster wanted to do was produce a good crossword puzzle for London's Daily Telegraph as he did each day in 1944. Little did he expect to be raided by secret agents of MI5, Britain's spy agency.

On May 2 of that year, one of the clues in the Telegraph's crossword was 'One of the U.S.' This gave the answer 'UTAH'. On May 12, one of the solutions was 'OMAHA'. On different days throughout May and early June, Dawe's puzzle solutions included the words 'OVERLORD', 'MULBERRY' (May 31), and 'NEPTUNE' (June 2).

So why were the British spooks interested in Mr Dawe? A remarkable coincidence had occurred in his innocent crossword. 'Overlord' was the Allies' codename for the entire Normandy invasion that was planned for June 6 – D-Day as we know it now. 'Utah' and 'Omaha' were ciphers for two of the beaches on which the Allies would be landing. 'Neptune' was code for the naval part of the operation, and 'Mulberry', the artificial harbour which would be put in place after the landing. Dawe had unwittingly stumbled into one of history's great coincidences, his pen being mistaken by MI5 as a likely tool of German espionage.

Some insights into coincidences

1962 The Beatles auditioned at EMI and were accepted. After listening to a playback of the audition tapes, producer George Martin said, "They're pretty awful".

1966 James Meredith (b. 1933), civil rights activist, was shot while trying to march solo across Mississippi, USA.

Meredith, in 1962 the first black student at the University of Mississippi, was shot and wounded by a sniper while working on a voter registration drive, in a lone 220-mile 'march against fear'.

At Hernando, Mississippi, 30 miles from his starting point and with FBI agents and reporters as witnesses, he saw an armed man take aim and Meredith dropped to the ground, but he was shot three times. Civil rights leaders rallied to the cause and came to continue the march from the point at which Meredith fell. He recovered from superficial wounds and later completed the march. Aubrey James Norvell confessed to the shooting and was sentenced to five years in prison.

From Wikipedia: James Meredith views himself as an individual American citizen who demanded and got the rights properly extended to any American, not as a participant in the US civil rights movement. There is considerable disrespect between James Meredith and the organized Civil Rights Movement. Meredith said recently that "Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind".

In a recent interview for CNN, Meredith stated, "I was engaged in a war. I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government – the Kennedy administration at that time – into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen".

Videos of Meredith (not the shooting)

In the Scriptorium: Activism & action page    Protest pictures (current)

1971 Soyuz 11 launched.

1974 A new Instrument of Government was promulgated, making Sweden a parliamentary monarchy.

1976 The Soweto riots in South Africa marked the beginning of the end of apartheid.

1977 Major Reginald Bristow died in a hospital at Elgin, UK, aged 66 - after 18 years and 3 months in a coma after a road crash. According to the Grampian Health Board, his appearance when he died was apparently unchanged from the time of the accident. He was described as being in a state of suspended animation. (May, John 1993, 144)

1979 At Morlaix, France, a bidder at auction paid 34,000 francs for Marie Antoinette's bidet.

1980 "Edwin Robinson gradually lost his sight and hearing after a severe head injury in a road accident. Nine years later, on 6 June 1980, he was out looking for his pet chicken near his house in Falmouth, Maine, during a thunderstorm, when he was struck by lightning and knocked out for 20 minutes. (He survived as he was wearing rubber soles.) The next morning he found he could see and hear again and y the end of August he had a full head of hair."   Fortean Times

1982 An anti-nuclear rally at the Rose bowl in Pasadena, California, USA, was entertained by Stevie Wonder, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and Bob Dylan.

Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list

1982 Poet/Buddhist/anarchist/semi-Beat/translator Kenneth Rexroth (b. 1905) died. He was involved with various labor groups and political anarchists. When the second literary renaissance of the 1920s occurred in Chicago, Rexroth was there. He was later involved in the Beat movement, a literary period that evolved in the 1950s & 60s that attempted to elevate common consciousness. Rexroth was called 'Godfather of the Beats' because of his involvement with the readings and events at the Cellar jazz club.

Source: The Daily Bleed    CounterCulture Wiki

1984 More than 700 Sikh militants and 90 Indian soldiers were killed when, at the order of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, troops stormed the Golden Temple in the holy city of Amritsar.

1985 The body of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele was located and exhumed.

1987 USA: Singer Michael Jackson ended his long-held support for the Jehovah's Witness faith.

1988 USA: Christian fundamentalist media watchdog Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association claimed to have seen Mighty Mouse snorting cocaine in a recent Saturday morning cartoon. The scene was cut from future broadcasts despite animator Ralph Bakshi's explanation that the cartoon rodent was sniffing flowers.

1988 David Stern blew the world record bubble in New York. It measured 15.24 metres in length.

1989 Greenpeace officials announced that at least 50 nuclear weapons and 9 nuclear reactors, the products of US and Soviet naval accidents, had been lost on the ocean floor since World War II. Using data obtained through the USA Freedom of Information Act, the group (in conjunction with the Institute for Policy Studies) found over 2,000 major peacetime naval accidents have occurred since 1945, resulting in some 2,800 deaths. Accidents ranged from loss of an entire vessel and crew to minor collisions and fires that left little damage and some injuries.

Source: The Daily Bleed

1989 Grieving, hysterical mourners tore the shroud from the body of the Ayatollah Khomeini at the funeral of the militant Islamic leader.

1991 Speaking in his native Poland, Pope John Paul II denied that the Catholic Church was seeking political power there.

1991 Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz died of cancer.

2002 Eastern Mediterranean Event: A near-Earth asteroid estimated at 10 metres diameter exploded over the Mediterranean Sea. The resulting explosion was estimated to have a force of 26 kilotons, slightly more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb. Simon P Worden, Brigadier General in the United States Air Force, later drew attention to the fact that such an event might have triggered a nuclear war.

2002 The United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee announced it was probing Martha Stewart's ImClone stock sales.

2002 USA: The Wye Oak, Maryland's honorary state tree, was destroyed in a thunderstorm.

2003 The Guardian ('Museum's broken treasure not just any old shit') reported on a Viking turd in the Archaeological Resource Centre, York, England, that had recently broken into three pieces when an unfortunate teacher accidentally knocked over its display case.

2005 United States Supreme Court said no to medical marijuana.

2006 The date reads 6/6/06, which many people have referred to as 666, the date commonly associated with the biblical beast of revelation. Some people also believe on this date the birth of the Antichrist occurred and that dark times will follow. A remake of the classic horror film The Omen was released on this date, purposely for this reason.

NASA image of the Transit of Venus, 2004

2012 Transit of Venus (across the Sun). This takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and the Earth, obscuring a small part of the Sun's disc. During a transit, Venus can be seen from the Earth as a small black disc moving across the face of the Sun.

More in the Book of Days

Tomorrow: Ned Kelly's curse

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Wikipedia and David Brown's prodigious Daily Bleed are both excellent resources that aid my research.
I frequently make use of their generously liberal 'fair use', 'copyleft' and 'anti-copyright' policies, with much gratitude.
© My own copyright policy is also liberal, but as this is my livelihood, conditions apply.

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