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On This Day In History
April 19th, 797: Empress Irene Sarantapechaina of Athens organizes a conspiracy against her son to maintain power. Her supporters depose him and gouge out his eyes, and he will die of his wounds. Irene proclaims herself basileus (monarch or emperor).
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On This Day In History
April 18th, 1930: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) announces on their evening report that "there is no news" and played piano music instead.
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On This Day In History
April 17th, 1961: A group of Cuban exiles return to the Bay of Pigs, trained and financed by the CIA, to oust Fidel Castro. The Bay of Pigs Iinvasion will fail in under half a week.
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On This Day In History
April 16th, 1943: Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers the hallucinogenic effects of LSD.
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On This Day In History
April 15th, 2024: The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump (the Stormy Daniels case) court trial begins. So far, we're working through getting jury selection--they need to find 18 New Yorkers who do not have strong feelings about Donald Trump either way.
On This Day In History
March 30th, 2023: Donald Trump is indicted by the New York grand jury, making him the first US president (current or former) to face criminal charges.
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On This Day In History
April 15th, 1912: The RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20am, having hit an iceberg at 11:40pm the night before. Fewer than one-third of those on board will survive.
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The Glamour Boys
Forgotten queer history: the Glamour Boys were a group of gay British politicians in the 1930s. Because they made trips to Berlin, which was then one of the most sexually liberal and liberated places in Europe (note especially Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sexology Institute), they were among the first to notice the warning signs of Germany’s descent into fascism.
They returned to the UK and argued loudly and without stopping for rearmament, against appeasement, and many of the enlisted and were killed in action during World War II.
The term “Glamour Boys” was a derogatory one given to them by Neville Chamberlain, the conservative Prime Minister best known for his failed appeasement of Hitler. He had the Glamour Boys harassed, their phones tapped, and their names slandered in the press. As gay public figures in a time and place where homosexuality was illegal, each faced great potential consequences by coming forward as they did.
Members include the following MPs: Robert Bernays, Ronald Cartland, Victor Cazalet, John Macnamara, and Anthony Muirhead.
Their story was largely untold until The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler (2010) by Chris Bryant.
"Churchill gets all the credit all the time because that's what he wrote. He was opposed to the policy of appeasement, and all the rest of it, but what nobody, I guess, would know is that half the time when Churchill and [Anthony] Eden were plotting with the rebels, roughly half the men in the room were 'queer'."
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On This Day In History
April 14th, 1999: NATO mistakenly bombs a convoy of Albanian ethnic refugees, killing 75.
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Hi! It's also Neil banging out the tunes day :)
You’re so right. Happy Neil banging out the tunes day!
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On This Day In History
April 13th, 1953: CIA director Allen Dulles launches the illegal mind-control program Project MKUltra.
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On This Day In History
April 12th, 1980: The Americo-Liberian government of Liberia is deposed in a violent coup.
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On This Day In History
April 11th, 1909: The city of Tel Aviv is founded in what was then the Ottoman Empire.
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On This Day In History
April 10th, 1938: The Anschluss. In a vote of all people, 99.7% of Austrians approve of the political unification of Austria and Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
The ballots for this vote were not kept secret, and threats and coercion were made to ensure the vote supported the wishes of the ruling party.
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On This Day In History
April 10th: 1407: Deshin Shekpa, the 5th Karmapa Lama, visits the Ming Dynasty.
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On This Day In History
April 9th, 1860: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice on his phonautograph machine. Used to study acoustics, it would take twenty years before anyone realized the recorded sound could be played back.
The audio file can be accessed here.
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On This Day In History
April 8th, 1950: India and Pakistan sign the Liaquat-Nehru Pact. The treaty was sought to guarantee minority rights, avert another Indo-Pakistani War, and protect refugees.
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On This Day In History
April 7th, 1141: Empress Matilda, the 'Lady of the English', becomes the first female ruler in the history of England.
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