A new wave of research into genocide is overturning stories about victims going meekly to slaughter.

Resistance was frequent, both among the Armenians (against whom the Turks began a genocide #OTD in 1915) and among Jews during the Holocaust.

#ArmenianGenocide #YomHaShoah #NeverForget
theconversation.com/genocide-r… #Histodons

Genocide resisters, long overlooked by history, step into the spotlight

Recent studies on mass violence have turned the spotlight on the resilience of targeted individuals and communities.

^{The Conversation}

#OnThisDay, 22 April 1969, Bernadette Devlin makes her maiden speech in the House of Parliament in London. An Irish Republican, she had rejected their tradition of abstention in order to take her seat. She remained an MP until 1974.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #BritishHistory #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 20 Apr 1902, Maria Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie refine radium chlorine. The discovery leads to Marie being the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

The Academy originally planned to award only Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Pierre insisted that Marie should also be included.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomenInSTEM #NobelWomen #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1967, Kathrine Switzer becomes the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon as a registered runner, despite the organiser physically trying to stop her.

She ran it again in 2017, 50 years later.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 18 Apr 1905, Baroness Bertha von Suttner becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism.

As well as writing an influential novel, Lay Down Your Arms (1889), she founded the German Peace Society in 1892. In 1907 she was the only woman to attend the Second Hague Peace Convention, and warned that Europe was heading for war once again.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #EuropeanHistory #NobelWomen #Histodons

#OTD 200 years ago, France forced Haiti to pay for its own freedom—150 million francs, extorted under threat of war.

That ransom bled the world’s first Black republic dry and still reverberates through Haiti today.

Now Haitians are asking: When will France pay reparations? buff.ly/UCpHhS1

200 years ago, France extorted Haiti in one of history’s greatest heists – and Haitians want reparations

After being exploited for decades by France, Haiti ended up forking over huge sums of money to its former colonizer. Now, the Caribbean nation’s calls for restitution are becoming harder to ignore.

^{The Conversation}

#OnThisDay, 15 Apr 1960, Ella Baker convenes a conference of 126 independent student protest groups. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) forms as a result. SNCC coordinated and assisted direct-action challenges to segregation in the USA.

Baker was a civil rights activist for five decades, and advocated grassroots activism. She also criticised the misogyny she encountered within the movement.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 13 Apr 1985, Danuta Danielsson hits a neo-Nazi with her handbag in Växjö, Sweden. Yes, that photo by Hans Runesson.

Danuta had been born in Poland in 1947, after her Jewish mother had survived a concentration camp.

#EuropeanHistory #WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons

Very early #OnThisDay, 12 Apr 1944, Odette Wilen parachutes into France to work as a wireless operator for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supports the French resistance.

Wireless operators were at the greatest risk of discovery, as their position could be triangulated whenever they were transmitting messages back to London.

Wilen evades capture by minutes and escapes over the Pyrenees. She lives until 2015.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WorldWar2 #Histodons

“Above all, I wanted to be appreciated as a prima ballerina who happened to be a Native American, never as someone who was an American Indian ballerina.”

Died #OTD, 11 Apr 2013, Maria Tallchief - the first prima ballerina of Native American descent (Osage).

We'd love a date for her stage debut.

"I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own."

#OnThisDay, 10 Apr 1864, army surgeon Dr Mary Edwards Walker is captured by the Confederates during the US Civil War. She later receives the Medal of Honor.

As well as serving in the Civil War, and being a dress reformer who preferred to wear trousers, she was also a suffragist who declined to take her husband’s name when they married.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 8 Apr 1959, Mary K Hawes initiates a project to create the first universal programming language for computers used by businesses and government. Grace Hopper led the team that then created COBOL. Some mainframes are still using it.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WomenInSTEM #Histodons

Why is a bridge in Sarajevo named after two women?

#OnThisDay, 5 Apr 1992, Suada Dilberović, a Muslim, and Olga Sučić, a Catholic, were killed whilst on a peace protest in Sarajevo during the outbreak of the Bosnian war. They are the first civilian casualties in what became the Siege of Sarajevo. The siege lasted 1,425 days, and over 5,000 civilians were killed during it.

The bridge they died on has been renamed in their memory.

#WomenInHistory #EuropeanHistory #OTD #History #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 2 Apr 1917, Jeanette Rankin is sworn in, becoming the first woman to sit in the US Congress.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons

It's the 26th anniversary of The Matrix, written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, released on March 31st, 1999, making cinematic history and forever leaving its mark on the Sci-Fi genre.

#TheMatrix #CineMastodon #OTD #FilmMastodon #Movies #Matrix

#OnThisDay, 1 April 1983, around 200 women dressed as teddy bears or Easter bunnies break into the Greenham Common airbase in the UK to stage a protest picnic against nuclear warfare. Greenham was due to house US nuclear missiles

A further 40,000 protestors, men and women, form a human chain linking #Greenham to #Aldermaston and Burghfield.

Women had established the peace camps at Greenham in 1981.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #BritishHistory #PeaceProtests #Histodons

“Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."

#OnThisDay, 31 Mar 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, who was drafting the Declaration of Independence. He declined her suggestions.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#OTD in 1862.

The first two volumes of Victor Hugo's epic historical novel Les Misérables appear in Brussels, followed on April 3 by Paris publication, with the remaining volumes on May 15. The first English-language translations, by Charles Edwin Wilbour, are published in New York on June 7, and by Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall, in London in October.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%…

Les Misérables at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?q…

#books #literature

French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard was born #OTD in 1781. He was known for his contributions to information graphics, including his famous map of the losses suffered by Napoleon during the 1812 Russian campaign.

Writing about Minard's map, Edward Tufte said “It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”

Image: Charles Minard / Public domain

On this day in 1967, more than 10,000 people showed up for a "be-in" in NYC's Central Park.

"It represents a cultural moment in our history. Central Park became an epicenter of the counterculture in New York, where different people from all walks of life could gather."

nytimes.com/2019/03/25/style/c…

#OnThisDay #OTD #history #protests #protest #BeIn #counterculture #NYC #CentralPark #The60s

When a ‘Be In’ in Central Park Was Front-Page News

Fifty-two years ago, thousands came to Central Park for a counterculture happening that influenced decades of political gatherings there.

^{Laura M. Holson (The New York Times)}