Tycho's discovery was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's poem, 'Al Aaraaf'.   Source

"In 1572, astronomer Tycho Brahe witnessed the supernova that created the stellar remnant Cassiopeia A. All that remains from this powerful explosion is a cloud of debris expanding away from a neutron star. New images from NASA's Spitzer space telescope show that this neutron star isn't out of action yet, though, in fact, it might have fired out a blast of energy 50 years ago, which is now lighting up the surrounding material. This recent activity might mean that the neutron star is actually an exotic magnetar, which regularly release bursts of gamma rays."   Source

I found this by stopping in at Universe Today, in the Scriptorium

1620 American colonies: In what is now Provincetown Harbor near Cape Cod, the Pilgrims drew up and signed the Mayflower Compact the first governing document of Plymouth Colony.

It was drafted by the Pilgrims while they were still aboard the Mayflower and modelled after the church covenant that the Pilgrims had drafted and signed in l607 when they had first separated from the English Church and fled to Holland.

It said, with original spelling and unedited text from the [History] Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford (1590 - 1657), second governor of Plymouth:

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britaine, France, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc., having undertaken, for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith, and honour of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northerne parts of Virginia, doe, by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just and equall laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the generall good of the Colonie unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cap-Codd the II. of November, in the year of the raigne of our sovereigne lord, King James of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fiftie-fourth. Anno. Dom. 1620.

1630 The Day of the Dupes

1648 France and the Netherlands agreed to divide the island of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin.

1675 Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the y=x function.

1675 Guru Gobind Singh became the Tenth Guru of the Sikhs.

1807 After the Anglo-Russian alliance against France was broken, Britain extended her naval blockade to Russia.

1831 Nat Turner, an American black slave who believed he was called by God to liberate his people, was hanged after a slave uprising in Jerusalem, Virginia, that saw 57 whites slaughtered.

The Confessions of Nat Turner

1839 USA: The Virginia Military Institute was founded in Lexington, Virginia.

1855 Death of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher.

1855 The Great Ansei Earthquake in Edo (Tokyo), Japan, with resulting fire damage and loss of approximately 7,000 to 10,000 lives.

Japan has a long tradition associating catfish with earthquake prediction, and ancient folklore says that a large catfish causes earthquakes. From this idea emerged a research program, concluding in 2004, in which it was proposed that the (established) high sensitivity of catfish to electric fields was involved in detecting fields of a few hertz because of piezoelectric effects on deeply buried quartz crystals.

"A giant catfish lived in mud beneath the earth. The catfish liked to play pranks and could only be restrained by Kashima, a god who protected the Japanese people from earthquakes. So long as Kashima kept a mighty rock with magical powers over the catfish, the earth was still. But when he relaxed his guard, the catfish thrashed about, causing earthquakes."   Source

"Two days after the initial earthquake, hastily printed, anonymous broadsheets and images began to appear for sale around the city. After several weeks had passed, over 400 varieties of earthquake-related prints were on the market, the majority of which featured images of giant catfish, often with anthropomorphic features."   Source

Earthquake prediction    List of earthquakes

1863 Elizabeth Scott murdered her husband, later becoming the first woman to be hanged in Victoria, Australia.

1864 American Civil War: Sherman's March to the Sea – Union General William Tecumseh Sherman began burning Atlanta, Georgia to the ground in preparation for his march south.

1865 USA: Medicine Bottle and Little Shakopee, two of the leaders of the Santee Sioux uprising, were executed at Pine Knob. They both had escaped to Canada, but officials there aided Americans in their kidnapping, and return to the United States.

1865 American author Mark Twain wrote an epitaph for Bummer, Emperor Joshua Norton's dog, the long-time companion of Lazarus.

Mark Twain hated those – especially 'Colonel Mustard' (Arthur Evans) – who belittled Norton. Twain worked next door to Norton's pathetic flophouse and saw the man nearly every day. Later in life, Twain hinted to others something of the torment that Joshua Norton suffered and the cruelty others showed him. Upon hearing of the Emperor's death, Twain wrote to his editor, William Howells, suggesting that the Emperor would make a fine subject for a book; a fit of writer's block removed itself and Twain was able to complete two novels: Huckleberry Finn, which featured a lost Dauphin, and The Prince and the Pauper, a story of confused identities.

Through these, he paid homage to the man he'd known.

Source: The Daily Bleed

1880 Australian bushranger and bank robber Ned Kelly was hanged for murder in Melbourne. His last words: "Such is life".

Below is an excerpt from his famous 'Jerilderie Letter', in which he railed against the oppression of the Irish in Australia:

"... Any man knows it is possible to swear a lie and if a policeman looses a conviction for the sake of swearing a lie he has broke his oath therefore he is a perjurer either ways. A Policeman is a disgrace to his country, not alone to the mother that suckled him, in the first place he is a rogue in his heart but too cowardly to follow it up without having the force to disguise it. next he is traitor to his country ancestors and religion as they were all catholics before the Saxons and Cranmore yoke held sway since then they were persecuted massacreed thrown into martyrdom and tortured beyond the ideas of the present generation What would people say if they saw a strapping big lump of an Irishman shepherding sheep for fifteen bob a week or tailing turkeys in Tallarook ranges for a smile from Julia or even begging his tucker, they would say he ought to be ashamed of himself and tar-and-feather him.

"But he would be a king to a policeman who for a lazy loafing cowardly bilit left the ash corner deserted the shamrock, the emblem of true wit and beauty to serve under a flag and nation that has destroyed massacreed and murdered their fore-fathers by the greatest of torture as rolling them down hill in spiked barrels pulling their toe and finger nails and on the wheel. and every torture imaginable more was transported to Van Diemand's Land to pine their young lives away in starvation and misery among tyrants worse than the promised hell itself all of true blood bone and beauty, that was not murdered on their own soil, or had fled to America or other countries to bloom again another day, were doomed to Port Mcquarie Toweringabbie norfolk island and Emu plains and in those places of tyrany and condemnation many a blooming Irishman rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke Were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains but true to the shamrock and a credit to Paddys land ..." [sic]
Kelly's 'Jerilderie Letter'

Gang leader Kelly was captured at Glenrowan at dawn on June 28, 1880, sentenced to death by Sir Redmond Barry on October 29, and hanged in Melbourne on November 11, 1880.

Ned Kelly    Capt. Thunderbolt    More    More    And more

Ned Kelly's Last Stand, in the Scriptorium    Text of 'The Jerilderie Letter' at Wikisource

Highwaymen, outlaws, bushrangers, pirates, gangsters, etc in the Book of Days

1880 Boycotting began

1880 Death of Lucretia Mott, American feminist, abolitionist.

1882 Australia: The coal steamer Austral sank in Sydney Harbour, killing five people.

1887 Chicago, USA: The Haymarket Martyrs – August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer and George Engel – were hanged for "inciting" the Haymarket riot, at which they had not been present. The execution was protested in many countries worldwide, and in Australia large commemorative meetings were held for some years.

A fifth, 23-year-old Louis Lingg, had killed himself in his cell the previous evening. The evidence against them was their anarchist ideas and literature. They were found guilty in a trial which Governor John Peter Altgeld subsequently held to be grossly unfair. History has generally judged the convicted men to have been innocent.

Another defendant, Oscar Neebe, received a reduced sentence of 15 years in prison, presumably because even the State Attorney admitted he had been at home during the bombing. Neebe protested to the judge that his sentence wasn't fair.

"Your honor, I am sorry I am not to be hung with the rest of the men," Neebe said at sentencing.

On May 4, 1886, a labor rally was held in Chicago's Haymarket Square to protest the shooting of several strikers by the Chicago police the day before. Halfway into the demonstration, made up of mostly German-born workers, a squad of nearly 200 hundred policemen arrived to break up the rally. As they began to forcibly disperse the crowd, a bomb was thrown into the advancing police by a person never positively identified. Policeman Mathias J Degan died almost instantly, seven other officers died later, and more than 60 others were wounded.

A grand jury indicted 31 labor radicals in connection with the bombing, and eight men were finally convicted. Judge Joseph E Gary imposed the death sentence on seven of the men and the eighth was sentenced to 15 years.

With the noose around his neck, Fischer cried out: "Hurrah for Anarchy! This is the happiest moment of my life". Parsons said: "Will I be allowed to speak, O men of America? Let me speak, Sheriff Matson! Let the voice of the people be heard!" From inside his hood, Spies made a short statement which would be heard for decades in working class circles: 'The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.'

About a quarter of a million people lined Chicago's streets during Parson's funeral procession. The executions elicited an international outcry.

Source: The Daily Bleed

Haymarket Martyrs and Australia

In Australia as elsewhere, there was considerable support for the Haymarket Martyrs and there were annual public events and fundraisers that attracted large numbers of progressive people. In Sydney, Australian radical poet Henry Lawson told his radical friends to mention the Haymarket Martyrs to Mathilde Bertha McNamara (wife of WHT McNamara of McNamara's, the radical bookshop at 221 Castlereagh St, Sydney) if they wanted a feed. He called it "the password for a meal". In the second 1888 edition of The Republican, which was owned by suffragist Louisa Lawson and edited by her son Henry, the 21-year-old poet printed portraits of the Haymarket Martyrs, and wrote an article on the subject.

Haymarket Massacre archive    Atgeld

More     More    Haymarket Affair Downunder

More on Haymarket     The Dramas of Haymarket     Haymarket chronology

Evidence from the Haymarket affair     The Physiognomy of the Anarchists

On-Line Textual Resources: Representing Dissent: Immigrant-American Anarchists

1889 Washington, the Evergreen State, was admitted as the 42^nd US state.

1906 The first balloon crossing of the Alps took place. Pilots Murillo and Cresti took the Milano from Milan across the Alps, over Mont Blanc.

1911 The 11/11/11 cold wave: Many American cities in the mid-west broke their record highs and lows on the same day as a strong cold front rolled through.

1913 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), Indian leader and proponent of civil disobedience, was sentenced at Dundee, South Africa, to 9 months' rigorous imprisonment.

Lydia Kamekeha Liliuokalani Online: Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898)

1918 World War I ended: Germany surrendered and signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railway car in the Forest of Compiègne, France. It is believed that about nine million people lost their lives in World War I.

1918 Józef Piłsudski arrived in Warsaw and assumed supreme military power in Poland.

1918 Emperor Charles I of Austria abdicated.

1918 Harry Gardiner of Washington, known as the Human Fly, climbed the Bank of Hamilton (Ontario, Canada) building to celebrate the end of World War I.

While climbing the side of the building, Gardiner stuck his head into one of the open windows and signed some insurance papers. He also purchased a $1,000 bond. The 47-year-old professional Fly admitted that he had to try for insurance at the Bank of Hamilton because it had so far been impossible for him to gain insurance elsewhere, since he was considered a high risk. This spectacle brought much attention to the Bank of Hamilton.

"He had been climbing buildings for 13 years and had successfully climbed over 700 buildings in Europe and North America.  While climbing the side of the building, Gardiner stuck his head into one of the open windows and signed some insurance papers.  He also purchased a $1,000 bond.  The 47-year-old professional Fly admitted that he had to try for insurance at the Bank of Hamilton because it had so far been impossible for him to gain insurance elsewhere, since he was considered a high risk."   Source (This source is perhaps no longer extant; the URL might possibly found in the Wayback Machine archive.)

1920 The bodies of unknown soldiers of Britain and France were buried at Westminster Abbey and the Arc de Triomphe respectively.

1921 The Tomb of the Unknowns was dedicated by US President Warren G Harding at Arlington National Cemetery.

1921 The first Poppy Day was held in Britain.

1923 Adolf Hitler was arrested near Munich three days after his abortive 'beer hall putsch'.

1930 Patent number US1781541 was awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for their invention, the Einstein Refrigerator.

1933 US Dust Bowl: In South Dakota, a very strong dust storm stripped topsoil from desiccated farmlands.

1938 Typhoid Mary died, of pneumonia.

Mary Mallon (b. 1869) felt compelled to cook, and was not about to let anyone stop her. Even when her customers fell desperately ill around her, some even dying, and though the press called her a vile nickname, Mary kept on cooking. Typhoid Mary, as she was known, passed on the disease she carried (Typhoid Fever) to 51 people, of whom three died, in New York between 1904 and 1914. She died in a strictly-controlled place of quarantine.

"She was sent again to North Brother Island, where she lived the rest of her life, 23 years, alone in a one-room cottage. She was certainly not the only known typhoid carrier: In 1938 when she died, a newspaper noted there were 237 others living under city health department observation.

"But she was the only one kept isolated for years, a result as much of prejudice toward the Irish and noncompliant women as of a public health threat …"   Source

Would you call a restaurant 'Typhoid Mary's'?

See the list of top rejected restaurant names (like Exxon Valdez Seafood)

1940 World War II: Battle of Taranto – The Royal Navy launched the first aircraft carrier strike in history, on the Italian fleet at Taranto.

1940 The German cruiser Atlantis captured top secret British mail, and sent it to Japan.

1940 Armistice Day Blizzard: An unexpected blizzard killed 144 in the US Midwest.

1940 The Jeep was launched by the Willys-Overland Company.

1941 Governor-General Lord Gowrie opened the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

1942 The Road to Morocco, starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour, premiered.

1959 The first episode of Rocky and his Friends was aired, USA.

1961 Four hundred American helicopter crews were sent to South Vietnam to assist the 2,000 US military advisers and technicians.

1964 Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies reintroduced military conscription as a prelude to full-scale involvement in Vietnam.

1965 Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) was declared independent by the white minority regime of Ian Smith.

1966 NASA launched spaceship Gemini 12.

1967 Vietnam War: In a propaganda ceremony in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, three American prisoners of war were released by the Viet Cong and turned over to New Left antiwar activist Tom Hayden.

1968 A second republic was declared in the Maldives.

1969 Jim Morrison (of The Doors) was arrested by the FBI after repeatedly prodding a stewardess.

Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list

1971 Darwin, Australia entered the TV age. Channel NDT 8 began transmission.

1972 Vietnam War: Vietnamization – The United States Army turned over the massive Long Binh military base to South Vietnam.