1065 In London Westminster Abbey was consecrated. Still there. Seen it and the long lines of visitors waiting in the rain to enter but have never done so myself.
1836 In Adelaide the Acting Governor read a proclamation creating the colony of South Australia. The first and only Australian colony founded by free settlers, many of them from German-speaking Europe.
1869 In Philadelphia the Knights of Labor, a labor union of tailors, held the first Labor Day ceremonies in American history. This was a forerunner of Labor Day. Why is not one of the Philadelphia sports teams called The Tailors? Answer me that!
1895 In Paris the world’s first commercial movie screening took place at the Grand Cafe. For a fee the Lumière brothers screened a series of short scenes from everyday life.
1973 In Paris Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ in Russian. It put paid to Western apologist for the Soviet Union in documenting the persistence, severity, extent, and depravity of the slave system. These apologist told us that the Gulag went with the death of Stalin. Powerful. It is depressing to realise that at the same time there were comfortable intellectuals in Paris, London, and Sydney espousing the moral equivalence of the USA and USSR while never missing a meal. No mea maxima culpas have ever been heard. We went to the Gulag Museum in Moscow. Grim. The curator who showed us around had been a victim. The map below of gulags below shows the extent at the time Solzhenitsyn published.
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