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| July |
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8000
anti-war marchers demonstrated in Boston. Their banners
read:
“IS
THIS A POPULAR WAR, WHY CONSCRIPTION?
WHO STOLE PANAMA? WHO CRUSHED HAITI?
WE DEMAND PEACE.”
The parade was attacked by soldiers and sailors, on orders from their
officers.
|
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A
massive general strike and nonviolent protest in Guatemala
led to the resignation
of dictator Dictator Jorge Ubico who had harshly ruled Guatemala
for over a decade.
|
 |
| Juan
José Arévalo Bermejo |
Jorge
Ubico |
 |
On
March 15 of the next year, Dr. Juan Jose Arevalo Bermejo
took office as the first popularly elected President
of Guatemala, and promptly called for democratic reforms
establishing the nation’s social security and
health systems, land reform (redistribution of farmland
not under cultivation to the landless with compensation
to the owners), and a government bureau to look after
Mayan concerns. A decade of peaceful democratic rule
followed, until a CIA-backed coup in 1954 ushered in
a new, even more brutal era of genocidal regimes. [see
June 27, 1954]
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| The
United States exploded a 20-kiloton atomic bomb near Bikini
Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. |
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Sixty-one
nations, including the United States, Britain and the
Soviet Union, signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which set up systems to monitor
use of nuclear technology and prevent more nations from acquiring
nuclear weapons. 190 countries are now signatories; Israel,
India and Pakistan remain outside the Treaty. North Korea
joined the NPT in 1985, but in January 2003 announced its
intention to withdraw from the Treaty.
|
text
of the Treaty  |
|
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Publication
of the first monthly issue of Ms. Magazine, founded
by Gloria Steinem (“The truth will set you free. But
first, it will piss you off.”), Letty Cottin Pogrebin
(“Housework is the only activity at which men are
allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought
to be so competent at everything else”), and others.
|
The
first issue |
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Vermont's civil unions law went into effect, granting gay
couples most of the rights, benefits, protections and
responsibilities of marriage under state law. In the
first five years, 1,142 Vermont couples, and 6,424
from elsewhere, had chosen a Vermont civil union.
|
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| Spain
legalized same-sex marriage. |
|
| New
Jersey became the first British Colony in America to grant
partial
women's suffrage. The new constitution (temporary if there
were a reconciliation with Great Britain) granted the vote
to all those “of full age, who are worth fifty pounds
proclamation money,” including non-whites and widows;
married women were not able to own property under common
law. |
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Alarmed
by the growing encroachment of whites squatting on Native
American lands, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh called on
all Indians to unite and resist. By 1810, he had organized
the Ohio Valley Confederacy, which united Indians from
the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee,
Ottawa, and Wyandotte nations.
For several years, Tecumseh's Indian Confederacy successfully
delayed further white settlement in the region.
Chief
Tecumseh
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Slave
ship
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Early
in the morning, captive Africans on the Cuban slave ship
Amistad, led by Joseph Cinquè (a Mende from what
is now Sierra Leone), mutinied against their captors,
killing the captain and the cook, and seized control
of the schooner. Jose Ruiz, a Spaniard and planter from
Puerto Principe, Cuba, had bought the 49 adult males
on the ship, paying $450 each, as slaves for his sugar
plantation.
|
read
more
Joseph
Cinquè
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Massive
demonstrations a year earlier had helped ensure passage
of the Act.
|
U.S.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 into law, thus barring discrimination in public
accommodations, employment, and voting. The law had survived
an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate by southern members.
|
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" We have lost the South for
a generation," said Pres. Johnson to an aide, immediately
after signing the Act.
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 |
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| Children employed in the silk mills
at Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike for an eleven-hour
workday and a six-day workweek. With the help of adults, they
won a compromise settlement of a 69-hour week. |
|
At
least 31 people were arrested in London after their protest
against the Vietnam War turned violent. Police moved in
after scuffles broke out at the demonstration outside the
U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
read
more
Actress
Vanessa Redgrave joins 25,000 two years later at Anti-Vietnam
war protest, Grosvenor Square.
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The
U.S. Declaration of Independence from England began the
first successful anti-imperial revolution in world history.
Signed in Philadelphia by 56 British subjects who lived
and owned property in thirteen of the American colonies,
the document asserted the right of a people to create its
own form of government. The signers were members of the
2nd Continental Congress which had voted two days earlier
for independence from the monarchy and King George III.
Read
the Declaration
|
| On
July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously
adopted the Declaration of Independence. |
|
Slavery
was finally outlawed in New York State as the result of
the Gradual Emancipation law passed ten years earlier.
This freedom applied only to those who were 18 at the time
of its passage. Enslaved children born during the ten-year
period would not be freed until they reached the age of
21.
At the urging of William Hamilton, a freedman and carpenter,
and others, the end of slavery was celebrated in churches.
The Fourth of July had in the past been marred by young white
men attacking black people. |
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| The
Republic of Hawaii was proclaimed with Sanford B. Dole
as president. It was recognized immediately by the United
States government. This was the result of the successful
overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, then held by Queen
Lydia Liliuokalani, and the support by white Americans
on the islands for annexation by the United States. |
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| The Freedom of Information
Act, P.L. 89-487, became law. It established the right of
Americans to know what their government is doing. |
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"Give
Peace a Chance" by the Plastic Ono Band was released
in the United Kingdom.
Some facts about "Give Peace a Chance"
This song was recorded May 31, 1969 during a "Bed-In" John
Lennon and Yoko Ono staged at the Queen Elizabeth's Hotel in Montreal.
John and Yoko stayed in bed for 8 days, beginning May 26, in an effort
to promote world peace.
Some of the people in the hotel room who sang on this were Tommy Smothers,Timothy
Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Petula Clark. Smothers also played guitar.
This event promoting peace received a great deal of media attention.
|
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A national
anti-war conference in Cleveland, Ohio, mapped out activities
against the Vietnam War and resulted in the founding of
New Mobe (mobilization).
read
more about the mobes
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| The
Women's Peace and Justice Encampment began eights weeks
on a farm just outside the Seneca Army Depot near Romulus,
New York. The purpose of the gathering was for the women
to learn about and together protest the escalation of militarism
and the weapons build-up being led at the time by the Reagan
administration. |
|
| The
newly freed African-American population of New York, led
by men on horseback, marched in an Emancipation Day Parade
from the Battery at the foot of Manhattan to City Hall. |
read more |
|
The
1892 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson
Park was set ablaze, and seven buildings were reduced to
ashes. The fire was part of the chaos in reaction to Pres.
Grover Cleveland’s calling out federal troops to
end the Pullman Strike. The contingent of federal, state
and local forces equalled the number of striking workers.
The Pullman employees, who lived in company-owned housing
in Pullman, Illinois, had suffered massive layoffs and
pay cuts
averaging 25%. The company refused to cut the rent on the housing
its employees were required to occupy, nor would it bargain
with workers’ representatives.
The Pullman workers’ cause had been taken up by Eugene
V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who helped
organize a nationwide boycott of any train that included a
Pullman car.
read
the Pullman Strikers’ Statement read
more
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On "Bloody Thursday," police
armed with machine-guns against striking longshoremen and their
supporters, killed
two, wounded 32 more by gunfire, and injured 75 at Rincon Hill,
in San Francisco. |
Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, near Rincon Hill. |
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The
National Labor Relations Act became law, recognizing workers' rights
to organize and bargain collectively, when the bill was
signed into law by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
read
more about the act
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|
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Former
National Security Council aide Oliver North received a
$150,000 fine and a suspended prison term for his part
in the Iran-Contra scandal. That was a secret arrangement
directed from the Reagan White House that provided funds
to the Nicaraguan contra rebels (despite specific congressional
prohibition) from profits gained by selling arms to Iran
(at war with Iraq at the time) in hopes of their releasing
hostages, despite Pres. Reagan’s claim that he would
never trade arms for hostages.
North’s conviction was later overturned because evidence
revealed in the congressional Iran-Contra hearings had compromised
his right to a fair trial.
|
more
on "Ollie"
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In
one of the worst cases of violent union-busting, a fierce
battle broke out between
the striking employees of Andrew Carnegie’s steel
company, and a Pinkerton Detective Agency private army
brought on barges down the Monongahela River in the dead
of night. Twelve were killed. Henry C. Frick, general manager
of the plant in Homestead, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
had been given free rein by Carnegie to quash the strike.
At Frick's request, Pennsylvania Gov. Robert E. Pattison
then sent 8,500 troops to Homestead to intervene on behalf
of the company.
read
more
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In
Nazi-occupied Holland, thirteen-year-old Jewish diarist
Anne Frank and her family were forced to take refuge in
a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse under
threat of arrest and deportation to concentration camp
by the Einsatzgruppen (Task Force), a part of the German
Gestapo.
read
more
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|
Irene Morgan, a 28-year-old black woman, refused to move to the back
of the bus eleven years before Rosa Parks did so. Her appeal,
after her conviction for breaking a Virginia law forbidding
integrated seating, resulted in a 7-1 Supreme Court decision
barring segregation in interstate commerce.
read
more
|
 |
|
| Up
to 500 students in Berkeley, California, attempt to block
trains carrying troops destined for Vietnam along the Santa
Fe Railroad tracks; there were no casualties. Organized by
the Vietnam Day Committee, this was the first civil disobedience
at UC-Berkeley against the Vietnam War.
|
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| The
first military draft was instituted in the U.S. to provide
troops for the Union army in the American Civil War. Once called,
a draftee had the opportunity to either pay a commutation fee
of $300 to be exempt from a particular battle, or to hire a
replacement that would exempt him from the entire war. |
|
|
Labor
organizer Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones led
the "March of the Mill Children" over 100 miles
from Philadelphia to Pres. Theodore Roosevelt's Long Island
summer home in Oyster Bay, New York, to publicize the harsh
conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week.
It is during this march, on about the 24th, she delivered
her famed "The Wail of the Children" speech. Roosevelt
refused to see them.
the
March of the Mill Children
|
“Fifty
years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up
their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block.
Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the
manufacturers.”
from
Mother Jones’s autobiography
read
more about Mother Jones |
|
|
Scientists
held their first peace conference in the village of Pugwash,
Nova Scotia, Canada. The mission of the Pugwash conference
was to “... bring scientific insight and reason
to bear on threats to human security arising from science
and technology in general, and above all from the catastrophic
threat posed to humanity by nuclear and other weapons
of mass destruction....”
Pugwash
home
|
|
The United States conducted its first test of the neutron bomb. The neutron
bomb was a tactical thermonuclear weapon designed to cause very little
physical damage through limited blast and heat but was designed to
kill troops through localized but intense levels of lethal radiation.
a
neutron bomb explosion at a test site
|
 |
|
| 2,000
American Indian activists and anti-nuclear demonstrators
marched through the Black Hills of western South Dakota to
protest the development of uranium mines on sacred native lands. |
|
|
Vermont
became the first British colony in America to abolish
slavery when it adopted its first constitution following
its breaking away from New York.
|
read more |
|
The
Women's Peace Crusade organized a protest against the first
world war in Glasgow, Scotland. Processions from two sides
of the city, accompanied by bands and banners, wound their
way toward the Glasgow Green where they merged into one
demonstration of some 14,000 people.
read
more
|
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|
Vietnamese
guerillas ambushed two U.S. "advisers," making
them the first U.S. casualties since 1946 in Vietnam.
|
|
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Roy
Wilkins became the executive director of NAACP, the National
Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. He had edited the organization’s
magazine, Crisis, for fifteen years, and was one of the
most articulate of civil rights leaders.
|
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the
Roy Wilkins Memorial in Minneapolis
|
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| The International Court Of Justice
declared that, in almost all circumstances, use of nuclear
weapons is illegal. |
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During
World War I, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, leaders
of the No-Conscription
League, spoke out against the war and the draft. Both were
found guilty in New York City of conspiracy against the
draft, fined $10,000 each and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment
with the possibility of deportation at the end of their
terms.
more
about Emma and Alex
|
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|
|
Albert
Einstein
|
Albert
Einstein, Bertrand Russell and nine other scientists warned
that the development of weapons of mass destruction had
created a choice between war and survival of the human
species. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto was published in
London.
read
the manifesto
|
Bertrand
Russell
|
“Here,
then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful
and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or
shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative
because it is so difficult to abolish war.
The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations
of national sovereignty....”
|
|
| Ku
Klux Klan (KKK) members near Georgetown, Illinois, gathered
for an ill-fated cross-burning. The meeting started an
hour late. When the Klansmen went to plant their cross,
it was too heavy to move. Three hours later, after the
cross was chopped down to a portable size, it was planted,
but would not light. Finally, the Klan members gave up
and went home. |
 |
The
ugly history of the KKK |
|
 |
The Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior (named
after a North American Indian legend), was blown up in Auckland
Harbour, New Zealand, killing one and sinking the ship.
The Rainbow Warrior then
|
The
attack had been authorized by French President François
Mitterand because the environmental organization had plans
to protest France’s nuclear bomb tests in the South
Pacific.
The Rainbow Warrior today
|
 |
|
The
Niagara Movement, precursor of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was formed
in Buffalo, New York.
Meeting
at the home of Mary Burnett Talbert were W.E.B. DuBois, John
Hope and 30 others who rejected the accommodationist approach
of Booker T. Washington (“The wisest among my race understand
that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest
folly....”)
The Niagara Movement's manifesto was, in the words of Du Bois, "We want
full manhood suffrage and we want it now.... We are men! We want to be treated
as men. And we shall win." |
Mary Talbert
|
read
more about the Niagara Movement |
|
The American Indian Movement (AIM)
was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, George Mitchell, Dennis
Banks,
Clyde Bellecourt and 200 others.
They gathered to organize
to deal with widespread and persistent poverty among native
Americans, and unjust treatment from all levels of government. |
 |
American
Indian Movement
|
more
background |
|
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|
The
federal appeals court in Boston reversed the convictions
of Dr. Benjamin Spock and Michael Ferber who had been
found guilty of conspiring to counsel evasion of the
military draft in 1968. The judges considered his activity
covered under his right to free speech opposing the Vietnam
War.
|
 |
Dr.
Benjamin Spock and
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. |
read
A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority co-authored by
Dr. Spock (1967)
|
|
John
Ehrlichman, former top aide to President Richard Nixon, and
three others were convicted of conspiring to violate a citizen’s
civil rights. Ehrlichman, had approved a recommendation for
a covert investigation of Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 by writing
on a memo: "If done under your assurance that it is
not traceable."
Looking for information to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, agents
of Pres. Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into the
office of his psychiatrist. Ellsberg, a former Defense Dept.
analyst, had been responsible for public release of The Pentagon
Papers, documents outlining the U.S. history and strategy in
Vietnam, that had been classified as secret to avoid public
scrutiny. |
 John
Ehrlichman |
A simple Watergate
chronology |
|
| Massive
New York City protests decrying the first-ever wartime
draft led to a bloody riot as a mob of 50,000 burned
buildings (including an orphan asylum), stores and
draft offices, and attacked police. Some clubbed,
lynched, and shot large numbers of blacks, whom they
blamed for the war. |
|
By
the time troops returning from Gettysburg finally
restored
order, 1,200 had died over three days.
New Yorkers, spurred on by the Democratic leadership of Tammany
Hall and tired of the seeming endless war, had been angered
by Pres. Lincoln’s recent call for 300,000 more troops.
They especially resented the legal provision allowing a cash
payment ($300 commutation fee) as a way for the wealthy to
avoid military service in the Union Army.
|
New York City draft riot , 1863 |
read
more about the 1863 draft riots |
|
The
first Live Aid concert raised $75 million for agricultural
and technical assistance to Africa, many times the £10m
($14 million) expected. Described as the Woodstock of the ‘80s,
the world's biggest rock festival (in London, Philadelphia,
Moscow and Sydney, Australia, simultaneously and linked
by satellite) was organized by Boomtown Rats singer Bob
Geldof to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. |
 |
 Bob
Geldof |
The
Republic of Ireland (Éire) gave the most donations
per capita, despite being in the throes of a serious economic
depression at the time. The single largest donation (£1m)
came from the ruling family of Dubai (Al Maktoum). |
|
more
about Live Aid '85 |
|
| Bastille Day in France: Parisian
revolutionaries and mutinous troops stormed and dismantled
the Bastille, a royal fortress converted to a state prison,
that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs.
This dramatic action was proof that power no longer resided
in the King as God's representative, but in the people, and
signaled the beginning of the French Revolution and the First
Republic. |
 |
|
A
mere 22 years after the Declaration of Independence, Congress
passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to "...unlawfully
combine or conspire together, with intent to oppose any measure
or measures of the government of the United States...or to
excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or
resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the
President of the United States...."
The Declaration: “...whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to
abolish it, and to institute new Government....” |
read
the act |
|
The
Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 became law, the first in
a series of laws that ultimately became the Clean Air Act
in 1963.
This first merely provided funding to the Public
Health Service to conduct research.
|
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read
more
|
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A
group of Iraqi army officers staged a coup in Iraq and
overthrew the monarchy
of King Faisal II (who had ascended to the throne at age
four). The new government, led by Abdul Karim el Qasim, was
ousted in 1963 by a coup helped by the CIA and led by the
Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party—later dominated by Saddam
Hussein.
|
read
more |
|
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|
The Spanish Inquisition, a centuries-long
brutal effort by the Catholic Church to root out heresy, begun
in 1478, was officially abolished by King Bonaparte. King Ferdinand
and Queen Isabella of Spain had chosen Catholicism as their
religion and asked the pope to help purify the people of Spain.
Many thousands were forced to convert, were tortured to encourage
confession, and burned at the stake.
|
 |
more
on the Inquisition |
witch
burning during the Inquisition |
|
| Following
World War I, the U.S. War Department announced that it had
classified more than 337,000 American men as "draft
dodgers." |
read
a brief history of Conscientious Objection in America |
|
|
|
 |
Soldiers
from all over Catholic Europe, known as Crusaders, overtook
the defenses of Jerusalem and slaughtered both the Jewish
and Muslim populations. “Many fled to the roof of
the temple of Solomon, and were shot with arrows, so that
they fell to the ground dead. In this temple almost ten
thousand were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you
would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the
blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None
of them were left alive; neither women nor children were
spared.”Pope Urban II initiated the effort to wrest the
Holy Land from the hands of the “Infidel” (the city
had been under Islamic rule for 460 years) and assured those
who joined the first crusade that God would absolve them from
any sin associated with the
venture. |
| The
Sacking of Jerusalem |
read
first-hand accounts of the seige of Jerusalem
|
|
The
U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project succeeded as the first
hand-made experimental atomic bomb, known as the “Gadget,” was
successfully detonated at the top of a 100 ft. (30m) tower
in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico (at the Trinity
test site now the White Sands Missile Range).
The original
$6,000 budget for the intensive and secret weapons development
program during World War II eventually ballooned to a total
cost of nearly $2 billion (more than $25 billion in current
dollars).
|
 "Gadget"
explodes |
| Assembled
in the McDonald Ranch house nearby, the orange-sized plutonium
core, weighing 13.5 pounds (6.1 kilograms), yielded an
explosive force of more than 20 kilotons (equivalent of
20,000 tons of TNT). |
The
official Trinity site |
What
it’s like there today |
|
The largest release
of radioactive material in the U. S. occurred in the Navajo
Nation. More than 1,100 tons of uranium tailings
(mining waste) and 100 million gallons of radioactive water
burst through a packed-mud dam near Church Rock, New Mexico.
The contaminated river, the Rio Puerco, showed 7,000 times
the allowable standard of radioactivity for drinking water
below the broken dam shortly after the breach was repaired. |
 |
|
 |
Saddam
Hussein became president of the Iraqi republic, secretary
general of the Ba’ath Party Regional Command, chairman
of the Revolutionary Command Council, and commander-in-chief
of the armed forces. He had been the ambitious protegé of
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who resigned on this day. |
watch a video about how Saddam Hussein came
to power
(with a little help from the CIA)
|
|
| During
a time of increasing tension between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
(Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and an escalating
nuclear arms race, 10,000 peace activists formed a human
chain linking the two superpowers’ embassies in London,
England. |
|
|
In
a significant early use of close air support, a U.S. Marine
squadron of seven airplanes dive-bombed rebels and peasants
surrounding Marines and Nicaraguan military (then under direct
U.S. control) in Ocotal, Nicaragua, killing more than 100.
The rebels were opposed the presence of U.S. forces, essentially
continuous since 1909.
|
|
Why was the
U.S. in Nicaragua? |
|
|
The
opening ceremony of the 21st Olympic Games in Montreal
was marked by the withdrawal of more than twenty African
countries, Iraq and Guyana, and their 300 athletes. They
had demanded that New Zealand be banned from participation
because its national rugby team had toured South Africa,
itself banned from the Olympics since 1964 for its refusal
to end the racially separatist policy of apartheid.
|
| The
Soweto Massacre, in which 150 children were killed by South
African troops, had occurred just one month earlier. The
apartheid government had been using international sport
as a means to build respectability. The following year,
however, in reaction to the Olympic boycott, the nations
of the British Commonwealth adopted the Gleneagles Agreement,
discouraging all sporting contacts with South Africa. |
|
Fighters
of the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the
U.S.-supported dictatorial regime of Anastasio Somoza in
the Central American republic of Nicaragua and forced him
to flee the country. The notorious and feared U.S.-trained
National Guard crumbled and its surviving commanders negotiated
a surrender, despite their superiority in armaments.
The Sandanista
Revolution
|
 Anastasio
Somoza |
|
 |
Girls
born after the historic Sandinista victory.
Legal voting age
in Nicaragua is 16 years.
|
|
|
Great
Britain, under the leadership of William Gladstone, passed
allaw requiring
voting by secret ballot. Previously, people had to mount a
platform in public and announce their choice of candidate to
the officer who then recorded it in the poll book.
Secrecy
served to prevent the possibility of coercion and retaliation
for one’s vote. |
 |
a ballot box used in 1872
election |
|
|
|
Nelson Mandela was born.
He was one of the leaders in the successful fight against
apartheid in South Africa and became its first black
president. In 1993 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
| | |
