#OTD: Buzz Aldrin, at age 72, punched moon landing conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel in the face outside a Beverly Hills hotel on September 9, 2002, after Sibrel aggressively accused him of lying about walking on the moon and called Aldrin a “coward, a liar, and a thief.”
Bart Sibrel, a well-known conspiracy theorist, confronted Aldrin and tried to coerce him into swearing on a Bible that he had indeed walked on the moon. Sibrel had arranged the meeting under false pretenses and repeatedly harassed Aldrin both verbally and physically, including poking him with a Bible.
When Sibrel escalated by calling Aldrin a “coward, liar, and thief,” Aldrin retorted, “get away from me,” and then punched Sibrel in the jaw.
Sibrel attempted to press charges against Aldrin, but the case was thrown out by the court, which determined Sibrel was the instigator of the confrontation. The punch was widely covered, and Aldrin received much public support, with many noting that challenging the integrity of a decorated astronaut and war veteran was deeply offensive.
#OTD: A Native American group called United Native Americans occupied Mount Rushmore on August 29, 1970, to protest the broken Treaty of Fort Laramie. The treaty, signed in 1868, had granted the Sioux rights to all land in South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills where Mount Rushmore is located. The occupation was led by young activists who set up camp behind the carved faces of the four U.S. presidents to demand the return of their land, which the U.S. government took after gold was discovered, violating the treaty. The protest lasted several months and brought significant attention to the unresolved land rights and treaty violations against Native American tribes, particularly the Sioux.
The activists renamed the monument “Crazy Horse Mountain” and raised slogans emphasizing Sioux Indian power. The 1970 occupation is considered the first Indian uprising in South Dakota since the defeat of General Custer in 1876. Subsequent protests and occupations of the site continued to press for honoring treaty promises and returning the land to Native peoples.
The Treaty of Fort Laramie set aside the Black Hills and surrounding areas as Sioux territory, but after gold was found, the U.S. government seized the land illegally, nullifying the treaty without consent. Legal battles have continued, notably a 1980 Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Sioux, though the tribes have not accepted monetary compensation, insisting on land return instead.
#OnThisDay, 2 Aug 1855, Elizabeth Ann Holman goes on trial in Plymouth, UK, for being a suspicious person because she was discovered to be a woman disguised as a man. The case is dismissed. As is a second charge against her for wearing trousers in 1858.
39 years today since Jim Henson's cult classic 'Labyrinth' was released on June 27th 1986, with George Lucas as executive producer, starring Jennifer Connelly as Sarah Williams and David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King.
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.
#OtD 2 Apr 1976 filming the first Star Wars movie began at Elstree Studios, UK. George Lucas was surprised by the crew's working practices – starting and finishing work exactly on time and taking 2 set tea breaks a day. Workers had fought for tea breaks: shop.workingclasshistory.com/c…
Online shop for the Working Class History project: radical, union, labor, socialist, communist, feminist, Black history, anti-colonial, LGBT+, disability rights, anarchist and anti-racist products and merchandise. Purchases support the WCH project.
#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly. Hewish received the Nobel prize for it in 1974: Bell Burnell did not.
In 2018 Bell Burnell received a £3m prize for her work. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
25 years ago, on February 13, 2000 the final "Peanuts" comic strip was released. It followed the death of Charles M. Schulz the day before, as he passed away only a few hours before its publication, serving as his final farewell to his readers.
Lord Byron's semi-autobiographical tale in verse The Corsair is published by John Murray in London and sells 10,000 copies on this day and over 25,000 in the first month, going through seven editions. Walter Scott is to say of Byron's poetry: "He beat me out of the field in description of the stronger passions and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart."
#OtD 28 Jan 1917 Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old Mexican maid who worked in the US, refused to take a gasoline bath at the border. Protest spread and resulted in the bath riots. But fumigation of workers, including by Zyklon B, continued until the 50s stories.workingclasshistory.co…
Happy 30th anniversary Star Trek Voyager, which premiered #OTD in 1995, as Captain Janeway and her crew began their voyage home across the Delta Quadrant! #StarTrek #StarTrekVoyager
On this day in 1983, the ARPANET network officially switched to using the TCP/IP protocol, effectively creating the Internet.
"January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other."
"What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow. What are brief? today and tomorrow. What are frail? spring blossoms and youth. What are deep? the ocean and truth."
Christina Rossetti, who died #OTD in 1894, was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
#OtD 20 Dec 1973 Spanish fascist PM due to succeed Franco, Luis Carrero Blanco, was assassinated and dubbed "Spain's first astronaut" as his car was blown over a five-storey building. His death was credited by some as hastening the return to democracy stories.workingclasshistory.co…
J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.
The first text message was sent on this day in 1992 by then a 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth to wish "Merry Christmas" to his colleague.
"It didn't feel momentous at all. For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."
On December 3, 1992, the first SMS text message in history is sent: Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, uses a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.
Mária Telkes died #OTD in 1980. She was a Hungarian-American biophysicist, engineer, & inventor who worked on solar energy technologies.
During World War II, she developed a solar water distillation device, deployed at the end of the war, which saved the lives of downed airmen and torpedoed sailors. In the 1940s she and architect Eleanor Raymond created one of the first solar-heated houses, Dover Sun House, by storing energy each day.
#OnThisDay, 28 Nov 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the existence of pulsars.
Not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for the discovery, Bell received a £3m prize for her work in 2018. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
Some of his notable poetry collections include "Új versek" (New Poems, 1906), "A Holnap" (Tomorrow, 1908), and "A halottak élén" (At the Head of the Dead, 1918).
William Rowan Hamilton invents quaternions, a 3D system of complex numbers.
Important precursors to this work included Euler's four-square identity (1748) & Olinde Rodrigues' parameterization of general rotations by 4 parameters (1840), but neither of these writers treated the four-parameter rotations as an algebra. Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered quaternions in 1819, but this work was not published until 1900.
17 May is Día das Letras Galegas (Galician Literature Day).
#OnThisDay, 17 May 1863, María Rosalía Rita de Castro's poetry is published. It’s the first publication by a single author in Galician for 400 years. The public holiday was introduced to celebrate the centenary of Rosalia de Castro's work.
Very early #OnThisDay, 6 May 1944, Marguerite 'Peggy' Knight parachutes into occupied France to be a courier for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French resistance.
Knight fought her way out of an attempted capture, and returned to the UK in September 1944.
#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.
The first movie version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is released in the U.S. by Edison Studios. One of the first horror films, it features unbilled the actor Charles Ogle as Frankenstein's monster, & Mary Fuller as the doctor's fiancée.
Months ago, i learned about the restoration of the first film version of Frankenstein carried out by the Library of Congress and noticed that the picture...
Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days #OTD in 1890.
In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) into fact for the1st time. November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 40,070 kilometer journey. via @wikipedia
Lebanese writer, poet and visual artist Kahlil Gibran was born #OTD in 1883. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages. His principal works in English (besides the above mentioned) are The Madman, The Forerunner, Sand and Foam, and Jesus, the Son of Man.
Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós died #OTD in 1920. He was the leading literary figure in 19th-century Spain, and some scholars consider him second only to Miguel de Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist. He came to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912, but his anticlericalism caused him to be successfully boycotted by the most conservative sectors of Spanish society, represented in traditionalist Catholicism, who did not recognize his intellectual and literary value.
French educator Louis Braille was born #OTD in 1809.
He was the inventor of a reading and writing system named after him, braille, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtually unchanged to this day. He was blinded when he was 3 years old. But when he was still a student, Louis Braille was frustrated by his inability to read and write. 1/
December 18th, 256 BCE—#OTD #OnThisDay the foremen of a group of stonecutters write to the architect Kleon, complaining that the quarry supervisor is wearing away their tools by assigning them all the hard stone while he assigns his own men all the soft stone.
A paper by the Reverend John Michell was read before the Royal Society #OTD in 1783. It included the first prediction of what, given the understanding of gravity at the time, you might call a Black Hole.
Hungarian mathematician, self-taught engineer and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer. Klára made significant contributions to the world of programming, including work on the Monte Carlo method, ENIAC, and MANIAC I. She was introduced to a lot of her work through her husband, John von Neumann. via @wikipedia
"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be." Dracula
Irish novelist and critic, who created Count Dracula, Bram Stoker was born #OTD in 1847. Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but completely fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to the story.
Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She discovered fission in uranium with Otto Frisch, and was the first person to understand both its mechanics and implications.
Per usual, the Nobel Committee awarded a prize to some of her colleagues, but left her off.
Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation (photographer unknown)
