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1933: In this year, under Stalin, the Russian gulag...

National or international item

1933

In this year, under Stalin , the Russian gulag or concentration camp system was occupied by two and a half million prisoners, most of them accused of sabotage or of owning land.
Netz, Reviel. “Barbed Wire”. London Review of Books, 20 July 2000, pp. 30-5.
34

9 October 1915: Christabel Pankhurst, Emmeline Pankhurst,...

Building and people item

9 October 1915

Christabel Pankhurst , Emmeline Pankhurst , Flora Drummond , and Annie Kenney edited the first issue of Britannia, a weekly suffragette periodical and organ of the Women's Social and Political Union formerly known as The Suffragette.
Doughan, David, and Denise Sanchez. Feminist Periodicals, 1855-1984. Harvester Press, 1987.
38
Dancyger, Irene. A World of Women: An Illustrated History of Women’s Magazines. Gill and Macmillan, 1978.
112
Garner, Les. Stepping Stones to Women’s Liberty: Feminist Ideas in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1900-1918. Heinemann Educational, 1984.
55

1952: The American Psychiatric Association, in...

Building and people item

1952

The American Psychiatric Association , in the first edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, classified homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance.
Marshall, Megan. Elizabeth Bishop. A Miracle for Breakfast. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
107

8 October 1959: Judith Hart, Labour candidate and founding...

National or international item

8 October 1959

Judith Hart , Labour candidate and founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , was elected to Parliament for Lanarkshire.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1833: This year's Keepsake had a printed jacket:...

Writer or writing item

1833

This year's Keepsake had a printed jacket: the earliest known such book jacket to survive.
Barcham, Maureen. “Letter”. Guardian Weekly, 5–11 July 2001, p. 18.
18

5 May 1640: The Short Parliament was unhappily disso...

National or international item

5 May 1640

The Short Parliament was unhappily dissolved.
Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. Editor De Beer, Esmond Samuel, Oxford University Press, 1959.
15

1889: Elizabeth Cochrane(Nellie Bly), the notorious...

National or international item

1889

Elizabeth Cochrane (Nellie Bly), the notorious Americanreporter, set out to better the (fictional) record for travellingaround the world set by the hero of Jules Verne 'snovel Around the World in EightyDays.
Trager, James. The Women’s Chronology: A Year-by-Year Record, from Prehistory to the Present. Henry Holt, 1994.
333, 336
Borne Back Daily. 2001, http://borneback.com/ .
14 November 2016

By December 1765: Sir William Blackstone published the first...

Building and people item

By December 1765

Sir William Blackstone published the first book of his Commentaries on the Laws of England; he completed it in 1769.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
20 (1765): 424-36
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

14 June 1781: The American Congress, accepting mediation...

National or international item

14 June 1781

The American Congress , accepting mediation by Russia and Germany, appointed five ministers plenipotentiary to negotiate peace with Britain.
Coakley, Robert, and Stetson Conn. The War of the American Revolution. Center of Military History, 1975.
130

1868: The cast of Tom Robertson's theatre production...

Writer or writing item

1868

The cast of Tom Robertson 's theatre production Caste travelled across the country by rail, beginning the tradition of the touring theatre company.
Booth, Michael R. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
18

1967: This year the French philosopher and critic...

Writer or writing item

1967

This year the French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida issued three of his best-known works: La voix et la phénomène, L'Ecriture et la différence, and De la Grammatologie.
Attridge, Derek, and Thomas Baldwin. “Jacques Derrida”. Guardian Weekly, 15–21 Oct. 2004, p. 30.
30

29 November 2010: An organization called WikiLeaks (which at...

National or international item

29 November 2010

An organization called WikiLeaks (which at this date few people had heard of) embarked on gradual public release of more than 250,000 secret (but not top secret) cables sent by US and other embassies around...

15 June 1866: The Austro-Prussian or Seven Weeks' War broke...

National or international item

15 June 1866

The Austro-Prussian or Seven Weeks' War broke out (deliberately provoked by Bismarck ) between Prussia and Italy on one side and Austria and a number of minor German states on the other.
“Austro-Prussian War”. Bartleby.com: Great Books Online: The Columbia Encyclopedia.

1603: John Florio published his translation of...

Writer or writing item

1603

John Florio published his translation of Montaigne 's Essays.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.

By 28 June 1884: Ida Ashworth Taylor (the middle one of three...

Women writers item

By 28 June 1884

Ida Ashworth Taylor (the middle one of three novelist sisters born at East Sheen in Surrey) published her first work: Venus' Doves, a romance.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2957 (1884): 820
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

1741: James Parsons published A Mechanical Critical...

Building and people item

1741

James Parsons published A Mechanical Critical Inquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites, which he said was designed to dispell ignorance and superstition and to reinforce truth.
Costa, Palmira Fontes da. “The understanding of monsters at the Royal Society in the first half of the eighteenth century”. Endeavour, Vol.
24
, No. 1, Mar. 2000, pp. 34-9.
38

Anna Williams

AW was an eighteenth-century translator and poet. Best-known among her slender oeuvre is a miscellany or anthology of contemporary poems. Her projected dictionary of scientific terms remained unwritten.
Anna Williams Photograph of a painting of Anna Williams by Frances Reynolds. Williams gazes slightly to the right, away from the viewer. She wears a white cap, with little hair visible, a white bodice, and black mantle or cape. Her pale face makes a strong contrast with the painting's dark background. The picture hangs in Williams's long-term home, Dr Johnson's House in Gough Square, London.

1891: Mary Dickens (grand-daughter of Charles Dickens)...

Women writers item

1891

Mary Dickens (grand-daughter of Charles Dickens ) published her first novel, Cross Currents, a story of the conflict between love and career in a talented actress.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

1937: Eve Garnett published The Family from One-End...

Women writers item

1937

Eve Garnett published The Family from One-End Street, which was remarkable as probably the first British story for children to centre on an ordinary, realistically depicted working-class family.
Ray, Sheila G. The Blyton Phenomenon. Andre Deutsch, 1982.
16
Akbar, Arifa. “Heroes and heroin: the 10 greatest novels for children”. The Independent, 20 Apr. 2007, p. 18.
18

April 1956: Nikita Khrushchev made another important...

National or international item

April 1956

Nikita Khrushchev made another important speech reflecting a change in Soviet opinion about the legacy of Joseph Stalin .
Anderson, Perry. “The Age of EJH”. London Review of Books, 3 Oct. 2002, pp. 3-7.
6

19 August 1874: John Tyndall attacked religion at a British...

Building and people item

19 August 1874

John Tyndall attacked religion at a British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Belfast.
Knight, David. The Age of Science: The Scientific World-View in the Nineteenth Century. Basil Blackwell, 1986.
190
Dean, Dennis R. “Through Science to Despair: Geology and the Victorians”. Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, edited by James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait, New York Academy of Sciences, 1981, pp. 111-36.
127
Sawyer, Paul L. “Ruskin and Tyndall: The Poetry of Matter and the Poetry of Spirit”. Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, edited by James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait, New York Academy of Sciences, 1981, pp. 217-46.
233

January 1848: The Plymouth Times reported, in connection...

National or international item

January 1848

The Plymouth Times reported, in connection with the publicly perceived perception of surplus women in the population, that the recently developed resort of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset had forty single ladies for every single man.
Trollope, Joanna. Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire. Hutchinson, 1983.
23

June 1879: The Conservative government appointed a Select...

National or international item

June 1879

The Conservative government appointed a Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Acts.
Walkowitz, Judith R. ’We Are Not Beasts of the Field’: Prostitution and the Campaign Against the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1869-1886. University of Rochester, 1974.
128, 130

By 1805: The Society for the Suppression of Vice brought...

Writer or writing item

By 1805

The Society for the Suppression of Vice brought its first prosecutions to court.
Bristow, Edward. Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700. Gill and Macmillan, 1977.
42, 45

September 2010: The Vice-Chancellor of Mumbai University,...

Writer or writing item

September 2010

The Vice-Chancellor of Mumbai University , responding to complaints from student members of the right-wing Shiv Sena organization, performed an emergency 24-hours'-notice removal of Rohinton Mistry 's novel Such a Long Journey from the syllabus.
Mistry, Rohinton. “Oh, what a sorry book-burning spectacle”. The Globe and Mail, 20 Oct. 2010, p. A17.
A17