1994
Kim Il Sung, 82, North Korea's Communist dictator since 1948.
^top^
The "Great Leader", born on 15 April
1912, dies of a heart attack. In the 1930s, Kim fought against the
Japanese occupation of Korea and was singled out by Soviet authorities,
who sent him to the USSR for military and political training. He became
a Communist and fought in the Soviet Red Army in World War II. In
1945, Korea was divided into Soviet and US spheres of influence, and
in 1948 Kim became the first leader of the Democratic People's Republic
of Korea (North Korea). Hoping to reunify Korea by force, Kim launched
an invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950, thereby igniting the Korean
War, which ended in a stalemate in 1953. During the next four decades,
Kim led his country into a deep isolation from even its former communist
allies, and relations with South Korea remained tense. Repressive
rule and a personality cult that celebrated him as the "Great Leader"
kept him in power until his death. He was succeeded as president by
his son, Kim Jong Il [16 Feb 1941~]. |
1961: 259 die as Portugese ship Save runs aground
off Mozambique.
1971 Kurt
Werner Friedrich Reidemeister, German mathematician, born on
13 October 1893, who was a pioneer of knot theory and whose work had a great
influence on Group Theory.
| 1959 Maj. Dale R. Ruis and Master Sgt. Chester
M. Ovnand become the first US servicemen killed in the US
phase of the Vietnam War when guerrillas strike a Military Assistance
Advisory Group (MAAG) compound in Bien Hoa, 30 km northeast of Saigon.
The group had arrived in South Vietnam on 01 November 1955, to provide
military assistance. The organization consisted of US Army, Navy,
Air Force, and Marine Corps personnel who provided advice and assistance
to the Ministry of Defense, Joint General Staff, corps and division
commanders, training centers, and province and district headquarters.
|
1957 William Cadbury, 89, chocolate maker
1943
Jean Moulin Le chef du Conseil national de la Résistance, Jean
Moulin, trahi, est arrêté à Caluire dans la banlieue de Lyon, le 21 Jun,
lendemain de son 44ème anniversaire. Le nazi Klaus Barbie commence
à l'interroger. Quelques jours plus tard, le 08 juillet, à
Metz, dans le train qui part pour un camp de la mort dans lequel on a déposé
son corps torturé, Jean Moulin meurt.
1925 Robert Bevan,
English Camden
Town Group painter and lithographer, born on 05 April (05 August?) 1865.
— MORE
ON BEVAN AT ART “4” JULY with
links to images.
1898 Jefferson
Randolph “Soapy” Smith killed in Skagway,
Alaska ^top^
A disgruntled city engineer in Skagway,
Alaska, murders "Soapy" Smith, one of the most notorious con men in
the history of the West. Born in Georgia in 1860, Jefferson Randolph
Smith went west while still a young man, finding work as a cowboy
in Texas. Smith eventually tired of the hard work and low wages offered
by the cowboy life, though, and discovered that he could make more
money with less effort by convincing gullible westerners to part with
their cash in clever confidence games. One of Smith's earliest swindles
was the "prehistoric man" of Creede, Colorado. Smith somehow obtained
a 3-meter statue of a primitive looking human that he secretly buried
near the town of Creede. A short time later, he uncovered the statue
with much fanfare and publicity and began charging exorbitant fees
to see it. Wisely, he left town before the curious turned suspicious.
Smith earned his nickname "Soapy"
with a more conventional confidence game. Traveling around the Southwest,
Smith would briefly set up shop in the street selling bars of soap
wrapped in blue tissue paper. He promised the credulous crowds that
a few lucky purchasers would find a $100 bill wrapped inside a few
of the $5 bars of soap. Inevitably, one of the first to buy a bar
would shout with pleasure and happily display a genuine $100 bill.
Sales were generally brisk afterwards. The lucky purchaser, of course,
was a plant. In 1897, Smith joined the Alaskan gold rush and eventually
landed in the rough frontier town of Skagway. Short on law and long
on gold dust, Skagway was the perfect place for Smith to perfect his
con games. He soon became the head of an ambitious criminal underworld,
and he and his partners fleeced thousands of gullible miners. Smith's
success eventually angered the honest citizens of Skagway, who were
trying to build an upstanding community. They formed a vigilante "Committee
of 101" in an attempt to bring law and order to the town. Undaunted,
Smith formed his own gang into a "Committee of 303" to oppose them.
On this day Smith tries to crash a
vigilante meeting on the Skagway wharf, apparently hoping to use his
con-man skills to persuade them that he posed no threat to the community.
Smith, however, had failed to realize just how angry the vigilantes
were. When he tried to break through the crowd, a Skagway city engineer
named Frank Reid confronted him. The men exchanged harsh words and
then bullets. Reid shot Smith dead on the spot, but not before Smith
had badly wounded him. The engineer died 12 days later. The funeral
services for Soapy Smith were held in a Skagway church he had donated
funds to help build. The minister chose as the text for his sermon
a line from Proverbs XIII: "The way of transgressors is hard." |
1876 White terrorists attack Black Republicans in Hamburg
SC, killing 5.
1840 Carel-Lodewyk Hansen, Dutch artist
born in 1765.
1823 Sir Henry Raeburn, Scottish painter
specialized in Portraits
born on 04 March 1756. — MORE
ON RAEBURN AT ART “4” JULY
with links to images.
1822 Percy
Bysshe Shelley, English Romantic poet, drowned. ^top^
Shelley dies drowned when a squall sinks
his sailing yatch the Don Juan, in the Gulf of Spezzia of
Livorno. After his body washed ashore near Viareggio, it was cremated
on 16 August 1822, as required by Italian law [1889
painting by Louis-Édouard Fournier].
His passionate search for personal love
and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into
poems that rank with the greatest in the English language.
Shelley, born on 04 August 1792, the heir to his wealthy grandfather's
estate, was expelled from Oxford in March 1811 when he refused to
acknowledge authorship of The
Necessity of Atheism. He eloped with his first wife, Harriet
Westbrook, the daughter of a tavern owner, in late August 1811. However,
just a few years later, Shelley fell in love with the Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin, 17, daughter of a prominent reformer and early feminist writer.
Shelley and Godwin fled to Europe, arriving in France on 28
July 1814, and would marry on 30 December 1816, after Shelley's
wife drowned herself.
Shelley's
inheritance did not pay all the bills, and the couple spent much of
their married life abroad, fleeing Shelley's creditors. While living
in Geneva, the Shelleys and their dear friend Lord Byron challenged
each other to write a compelling ghost story. Only Mary Shelley finished
hers, later publishing the story as
Frankenstein (1818). The Shelleys had five children but
only one lived to adulthood. After Shelley's death, when Mary Shelley
was only 24, she edited his Posthumous Poems (1824), Poetical
Works (1839), and his prose works. She lived on a small stipend
from her father-in-law, Lord Shelley, until her surviving son inherited
his fortune and title in 1844. She died on 01 February 1851 at the
age of 53. Although she was a respected writer for many years, only
Frankenstein
and her journals are still widely read. |
| PERCY SHELLEY ONLINE:
Adonais:
An Elegy on the Death of John Keats : while we "decay Like
corpses in a charnel," the creative spirit of Adonais, despite his
physical death, "has outsoared the shadow of our night."
Alastor:
or, The Spirit of Solitude (1816), blank-verse poem, warns
idealists not to abandon "sweet human love" and social improvement
for the vain pursuit of dreams.
The
Cenci (1819), tragedy of incestuous rape and patricide
in 16th-century Rome
The
Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1901)
A
Defence of Poetry (1840) essay: the poet creates humane
values and imagines the forms that shape the social order.
The
Necessity of Atheism (1811)
Prometheus
Unbound + short poems such as Ode to Liberty, Ode to
the West Wind, The Cloud, To a Sky-Lark.
A
Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) |
MARY SHELLEY ONLINE:
Frankenstein (1818): scientist creates artificial human
monster.
Frankenstein
(another site)
The
Last Man (1826), her best novel: future destruction of
the human race by a plague.
The
Mortal Immortal
Valperga
(1823) |
Prometheus Unbound:
a lyrical drama (1819) was the keystone of Shelley's
poetic achievement, a masterpiece that combines supple blank verse
with a variety of complex lyric measures.
In Act I, Prometheus, tortured on Jupiter's orders for having given
mankind the gift of moral freedom, recalls his earlier curse of Jupiter
and forgives him ("I wish no living thing to suffer pain"). By eschewing
revenge, Prometheus, who embodies the moral will, can be reunited
with his beloved Asia, a spiritual ideal transcending humanity; her
love prevents him from becoming another tyrant when Jupiter is overthrown
by the mysterious power known as Demogorgon.
Act II traces Asia's awakening and journey toward Prometheus, beginning
with her descent into the depths of nature to confront and question
Demogorgon.
Act III depicts the
overthrow of Jupiter and the union of Asia and Prometheus, who —
leaving Jupiter's throne vacant — retreat to a cave from which
they influence the world through ideals embodied in the creative arts.
The end of the act describes the renovation of both human society
and the natural world.
Act IV
opens with joyful lyrics by spirits who describe the benevolent transformation
of the human consciousness that has occurred. Next, other spirits
hymn the beatitude of humanity and nature in this new millennial age;
and finally, Demogorgon returns to tell all creatures that, should
the fragile state of grace be lost, they can restore their moral freedom
through these "spells":
To
suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than
Death or Night; To defy Power which seems Omnipotent; To love, and
bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
. . |
1797 Hendrik Willem Schweichardt, German artist born in
1746.
1709 Thousands of Swedish and Russian soldiers,
as Peter the Great with 50'000 Russians defeats Charles XII of with 20'000
Swedes at the Battle of Poltava. Only 1500 Swedes escaped.
Sweden's great power status was ended. (27 June, Julian)
1695
Christiaan
Huygens, The Hague mathematician, born on 14 April 1629, who
in 1656 patented the first pendulum clock, which greatly increased the accuracy
of time measurement. He laid the foundations of mechanics.
1496
Benedetto Bonfiglio da Perugia, Italian artist born in 1420.
1476 Johann
Müller of Königsberg “Regiomontanus”,
German Catholic priest, astronomer, mathematician, translator, publisher,
born on 06 June 1436. In January 1472 he made observations of a comet which
would be called Halley's Comet 210 years later. He observed eclipses of
the Moon, a total eclipses on 03 September 1457 and on 22 June 1461, a partial
eclipse on 03 July 1460. Author of De triangulis omnimodis (1464)
— Scipta — Kalendarium — De Reformatione Kalendarii.
1390 Albert
of Saxony, Saxon Catholic bishop of Halberstädt, philosopher,
logician, physicist, mathematician,
born in 1316, who wrote about the ideas of Bradwardine,
Ockham,
Oresme
and others. He examined 254 logical paradoxes in his books on logic.
0810 Pepin son of Charlemagne, king of Italy, (birth date
unknown)
|
On
a July 08: 
Deaths
