history meme ∙ (1/10) moments ∙ 1969 moon landing

Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC. (+more)

flaubertes:

history meme. five assassinations: lord mountbatten of burma by the provisional ira

27 AUGUST 1979: Lord Mountbatten, cousin to Queen Elizabeth II, went lobster-potting and tuna fishing with his family in a 29’ wooden boat, the Shadow V.IRA member Thomas McMahon had slipped onto the unguarded boat that night and attached a radio-controlled 50lb bomb. The explosion which killed Lord Mountbatten, his grandson Nicholas, aged 15, and his boatman, Paul Maxwell, aged 16, happened in full view of a Garda police patrol as it followed the progress of the boat from Mullaghmore harbour. The boat was only a few hundred yards from shore when the blast occurred and it sank immediately.

Sinn Féin vice-president Gerry Adams said of Mountbatten’s death:

“The IRA gave clear reasons for the execution. I think it is unfortunate that anyone has to be killed, but the furore created by Mountbatten’s death showed up the hypocritical attitude of the media establishment. As a member of the House of Lords, Mountbatten was an emotional figure in both British and Irish politics. What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don’t think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation. He knew the danger involved in coming to this country. In my opinion, the IRA achieved its objective: people started paying attention to what was happening in Ireland.” (x)

history meme. ten moments: Martin Luther posts ‘The Ninety-Five Theses’ on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg.
15 OCTOBER 1517. Officially entitled The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, this document is widely considered to be the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation. It criticized the abuse of power by the clergy and the sale of indulgences, arguing that it was a violation of the original intention of confession and penance, and that Christians were being falsely told that they could find absolution through the purchase thus making the act of absolution a financial transaction rather than a spiritual one. (This criticism was prompted by the indulgence imposed by Pope Leo X, the purpose of which was to build St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome.) 

history meme ∙ one war ∙ world war II

World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world’s nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, with more than 100 million people serving in military units from over 30 different countries. In a state of “total war”, the major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, it resulted in 50 million to over 75 million fatalities. These deaths make World War II likely the deadliest conflict in human history.(+more)

 history meme. seven pairings: queen victoria and prince albert.
She was an 18-year-old young woman who had just become Queen of England in 1837. He was her cousin and they married in 1840. Queen Victoria was most pleased with her new husband. She wrote to her uncle Leopold thanking him “for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert. “He possesses every quality that can be desired to make me perfectly happy.” Berkshire historian Jane Walton says: “He had actually been her right-hand man, he had helped with all the business, he’d taken the load of monarchy off her shoulders to a certain extent. “He devoted himself to sorting out the Royal finances, so much so they could afford to buy Osborne House - a home of their own that was their private residence.” For 21 years they lived in close harmony and had a family of nine children, many of whom married into the European monarchy. Prince Albert died of typhoid at Windsor on 14 December 1861. Victoria was overwhelmed by grief and remained in mourning until the end of her life. Cliveden in Berkshire offered some peace and quiet during political difficulties, such as when the Second Reform Act was going through the House Of Commons in 1867. She would arrive at Cliveden with a 90-strong entourage and a huge portrait of Albert, which she positioned on an easel at the end of the bed she stayed in, and a smaller portrait by her pillow. Jane says: “The one by her pillow was actually a portrait of Albert sleeping, so when she woke up it was as if Albert was still there.” (x)

history meme. ten moments: the funeral of Edward VII. 
His funeral at Windsor, following a procession through the streets of London, was one of the largest gatherings of European royalty ever to take place. It was also one of the last assemblies of its kind before the First World War shattered the bonds that united the interwoven monarchies. The conflict would destroy two of the most powerful royal houses and leave several of the others severely weakened as the political map of the continent was redrawn. (x)

The real ‘Red Wedding’ or “Nozze Rosse” took place in July of 1500; it was a bloodbath during which half the feuding Baglioni family of Perugia murdered the other half in their beds, a massacre which was quite overshadowed in contemporary chronicles. Violence and murder were common in the private lives of the Italian signorial families. Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini had two of his wives murdered: one poisoned, the other suffocated. Francesca Manfredi of Faenza lured her husband into her bedchamber on the pretext of being unwell and had him stabbed there by concealed assassins; when they bungled the job she coolly stepped forward, a fifteenth-century Lady Macbeth, and finished him off with a dagger thrust in the stomach. (X)

unhistorical:

May 4, 1970: The Kent State shootings take place.

The shooting of unarmed students by members of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, was one of the most notorious domestic events of the Vietnam War Era. It took place in the midst of a protest which itself was a reaction against government policy; antiwar sentiment was widespread throughout the nation, particularly among young people, so when President Nixon announced in late April that the U.S. military was to conduct military operations in Cambodia in pursuit of the PAVN and Viet Cong forces (which seemed to contradict his policy of Vietnamization and détente), student-organized protests on university campuses across the country erupted. These student strikes eventually involved at least 400 campuses, although the National Guard was deployed to only twenty-one of them, one of which was Kent State University in Ohio.

The Kent State demonstration began on May 1; the National Guard was called to the campus on May 2 by Governor James Rhodes, who denounced the student protesters and claimed that they were ”the worst type of people that we harbor in America”, comparing them to Nazi brownshirts and the Ku Klux Klan. Many in Kent and across the nation agreed with the governor’s condemnation of student protests, but just as many disagreed, to varying degrees. When the shooting and killing of Kent State students made national headlines, the issue remained just as divisive, with many believing that the students had brought the violence upon themselves. On May 4, the tensions between the guardsmen and students heightened. Tear gas was used in the guardsmens’ attempts to disperse the crowd, and at some point in the confusion, for some still unknown reason, a little under half of the 77 guardsmen present began to fire into the crowd of students. The guardsmen later claimed that they had been shot by a sniper and were firing in self-defense; this claim was denied vehemently by the students, who admitted to throwing rocks, and also by the New York Times reporter who had been on the scene. The reporter also wrote:

As the guardsmen, moving up the hill in single file, reached the crest, they suddenly turned, forming a skirmish line and opening fire.

The crackle of the rifle volley cut the suddenly still air. It appeared to go on, as a solid volley, for perhaps a full minute or a little longer.

Some of the students dived to the ground, crawling on the grass in terror. Others stood shocked or half crouched, apparently believing the troops were firing into the air. Some of the rifle barrels were pointed upward.

Near the top of the hill at the corner of Taylor Hall, a student crumpled over, spun sideways and fell to the ground, shot in the head.

When the firing stopped, a slim girl, wearing a cowboy shirt and faded jeans, was lying face down on the road at the edge of the parking lot, blood pouring out onto the macadam, about 10 feet from this reporter.

Four students were killed, and nine were wounded (one was permanently paralyzed from chest down). Of the four killed by rifle fire, two had not been participants in the protest. According to eyewitness accounts, the students were shocked at the fact that the guardsmen had fired upon them and even more shocked that they had fired live ammunition instead of blanks. John Filo, the photographer who captured the Pulitzer Prize-winning image of Mary Ann Vecchio and Jeffrey Miller (pictured above), also believed at first that the guardsmen were firing blanks. President Nixon expressed regret for the killings, although he suggested that the students’ disruptive activities had “[invited] tragedy”, and, according to a Gallup poll, the public agreed - according to the survey, only 11 percent placed blame on the National Guard, while 58 percent blamed the students. Eleven days later, two black students were killed at Jackson State University during an antiwar protest, though these events failed to capture national attention as the Kent State shootings did.  

demonagerie:

Rylands Medieval Collection, Latin MS 53, f. 58v. Christianus Prolianus and Joachinus de Gigantibus (?), Astronomia (1478)

“Comparative view of the magnitudes of the Sun (a large disc of burnished gold), the Moon (silver), Mars (gold), Venus (gold), Mercury (gold) and Earth (pale). Framed in a green wreath of leaves and blue background.”

unhistorical:

How to Spot a Communist

But there are other communists who don’t show their real faces… who work more silently… 

hintretro:

Girl looking in a rock pool, about 1890

Collection of National Media Museum/Kodak Museum

tiny-librarian:

The signatures of various members of the Royal Family on the baptismal register of Marie Sophie Hélène Béatrice de France, the youngest child and second daughter of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

unhistorical:

April 14, 1865: Abraham Lincoln is assassinated.

Five days after the surrender and deactivation of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House (the effective end of the war), Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth, a stage actor and Confederate sympathizer. The demise of the Confederacy pushed Booth, a strongly pro-South, anti-Lincoln Maryland native, over the edge, and he abandoned a kidnapping plot that he and co-conspirators Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen and John Surratt had been formulating since 1864 in favor of simple assassination.

On April 14, they learned that President Lincoln would be attending a performance of the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C., later that evening. He and the conspirators gathered once more, and it was decided that Lewis Powell and David Herold would attack Secretary of State William Seward, that George Atzerodt would carry out an assassination attempt on Vice President Andrew Johnson, and that Booth himself would kill Lincoln. The only attack of these that resulted in a death was Booth’s. He entered the Lincolns’ private theatre box during a particularly humorous moment in the play and shot the President once in the head, before leaping onto the stage, where he yelled either the Virginia state motto - “Sic semper tyrannis” - or “the South is avenged!” Booth broke his leg sometime between the fall and his escape, and he went on the run before being shot outside a barn in Virginia on April 26.

Lincoln, meanwhile, was moved to a house across the street from the theatre; he was pronounced dead early the next morning, the day before Easter Sunday. Utterly divisive as a leader in life, Lincoln was nevertheless mourned by millions in both the North and South in death.

pbsthisdayinhistory:

April 12, 1861: The Civil War Begins

On this day in 1861, General Pierre G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter and remained there for thirty-three hours until the fort was surrendered. 

Early on, the southern states wanted to secede from the nation due to conflicting opinions regarding slavery between the north and south. Once Abraham Lincoln was elected, it incited the southern states to secede and form the Confederate States of America. When the Confederates took over Fort Sumter, President Lincoln declared war.  

The Civil War lasted until 1865 with about 620,000 casualties. 

Explore this historical event further with Ken Burns’s The Civil War photo gallery.

Image: Md. Allan Pinkerton, President Lincoln, and Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand (Library of Congress)

losangelespast:

The first telephone pay station in Los Angeles, at 228 S. Spring Street, 1899. The service was not cheap: that 50¢ per minute call to San Francisco would cost $13.58 per minute in today’s dollars.