Today in 1945, 79 years ago: Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are shot dead by Walter Audisio, a member of the Italian resistance movement.

#OnThisDay

Today in 2000, 24 years ago: in the United States, the press recognizes that during the Vietnam War (1955-1975) the US military used the defoliant "Agent Orange", which caused deformations to more than 0.3 million children in that country in the last 25 years.

#OnThisDay

#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 #Histordons

#OnThisDay, 20 Apr 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie refine radium chloride. 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

“I expect this will be the making of me.”

#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1927, Mae West is convicted on obscenity charges for her play 'sex', and starts a ten day jail sentence.

She's released two days early for good behaviour.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #LiteraryWomen #AmericanHistory

#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1967, Katherine 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 #AmericanHistory

#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 #EuropeanHistory #NobelWomen

#OnThisDay, 17 Apr 1964, Jerrie Mock touches down in Ohio to become the first woman to fly solo around the world. Press coverage of the time made much of her being a “housewife”. 🙄

Watch a newsreel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Pz2zGZ3To

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AviationHistory #AmericanHistory

"My comrades, who did far more and suffered more profoundly than I, are not here to speak. Because of this, I speak for them."

#OnThisDay, 16 April 1943, Special Operations Executive agent Odette Samsom is arrested by the Gestapo in France. The British SOE worked with the French resistance.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #BritishHistory #WorldWar2

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#OnThisDay, 16 Apr 1912, Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly a plane across the English Channel.

Quimby was the first American woman to receive a pilot’s licence and made her living doing exhibition flights in the US. She also made money as the advertising face of a grape juice. She died in July 1912 when her plane pitched forward at 1,000 feet and she was thrown out.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AviationHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#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 #AmericanHistory #Histodons

Happy 130th anniversary to “going to the movies”! 🎞️

The first Edison Kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City #OnThisDay in 1894.

Price: 25 cents for 5 films (but they were only 15-20 seconds long).

#FilmMastodon #TCMParty

The Limerick Soviet (Sóivéid Luimnigh) was one of a number of self-declared Irish soviets that were formed around Ireland around 1919. The Limerick Soviet existed for a two-week period from 14 to 27 April 1919. At the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, a general strike was organised by the Limerick Trades and Labour Council, as a protest against the .... 1/2

#Ireland #IrishHistory #IrishWarOfIndependence #Limerick #LimerickSoviet #OnThisDay

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 #WorldWar2

"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 #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 #History #WomenInSTEM #Histodons

April 7th 216 CE—Pakysis kept a pantry on the second floor of his daughter-in-law's house, and it was discovered that the tenants below him had been stealing grain through a hole in the floor. He petitions a centurion #OTD #OnThisDay to make them pay it back.

https://papyri.info/ddbdp/bgu;1;322

#OnThisDay, 7 Apr 1141, Matilda is legally recognised as ruler of England in her own right. Her coronation never happens.

She was appointed heir by her father Henry I, then usurped by her cousin Stephen after Henry’s death. The civil war between the cousins is known as the Anarchy and lasted from 1138 to 1153.

#WomenInHistory #History #OTD
#EnglishHistory #AnarchyInTheUK #Histodons

Very early #OnThisDay, 6 Apr 1944, Lillian Rolfe and Violette Szabo separately arrive in occupied France to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SEO). Rolfe is a wireless operator, Szabo a courier.

Szabo returns to the UK at the end of April but goes back to France in June 1944 and is captured. Rolfe is captured in July 1944.

They are executed together, by shooting, in Ravensbrück concentration camp in Feb 1945.

#WomenInHistory #WorldWar2 #History #Histodons #EuropeanHistory

Why is a bridge in Sarajevo named after two women?

#OnThisDay, 5 Apr 1992, Suada Dilberović, a Muslim, and Olga Sučić, a Catholic, are killed whilst protesting for peace 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, 3 Apr 1979, Jane Byrne wins the Chicago mayoral election. She is the first woman to be mayor of the city and is sworn in on 16 April. She hires the first black woman to be a school superintendent in the city, and stops the police raiding gay bars.

Lori Lightfoot was the second woman to hold the post, from 2019 to 2023. She’s the first black woman and the first LGBT+ mayor since the post was created in 1837.

#WomenInHistory #History #OTD #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 3 Apr 1913, suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst is sentenced to three years' penal servitude, and announces she will go on hunger strike.

#WomenInHistory #History #OTD #BritishHistory #VotesForWomen #Histodons