1891 Queensland’s the great shearers’ strike began, leading to the foundation of the Australian Labor Party to represent the interests of workers in parliament.
1895 In Paris in an elaborate public ceremony the blameless Captain Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of rank, humiliated, and trundled through the streets to become the sole inhabitant of Devil’s Island. Robert Harris’s novel about this affair will be discussed on the blog in a post.
1914 In Detroit Henry Ford paid a minimum wage of $5 a day and shared with employees $10 million in the previous year’s profits.
1937 In Lincoln (Nebraska) the first session of the new unicameral state legislature occurred. It is the only unicameral in the United States. (We will not mention Queensland.) George Norris led the campaign for the change which he started in Hastings as detailed in the discussion of a biography of Norris elsewhere on this blog.
1968 The Prague spring began when Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It ended with tanks on 21 August. We saw some of the sites when in Prague.
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