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Join for content related to world history, archaeology, and historiography. Run by @its_just_b - feedback and messages welcome.
The Internet Archive, which holds a titanic amount of valuable historical books and media, is facing a devastating lawsuit. Read about it here;
https://www.battleforlibraries.com/
While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council...
A letter written by Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln upon his re-election and moves towards victory in the American Civil War (1864-65). It is signed by representatives of the Workingmen's Association.
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Constantius I was Roman caesar from 293 and emperor between 305 and 306. For his defeat of the Carausian revolt in Gaul and Britain, he became known, at least in the west, as "REDDITOR LVCIS AETERNA", meaning restorer of the eternal light, as depicted on this medallion found in Arras.
He was posthumously nicknamed "Chlorus" for his pale complexion.
19 March 1965: Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov is the first person to perform a space walk, tethered to his space capsule. Because of the difference in pressure, his suit expanded and became too large to fit into the ship, so he had to deflate it and subsequently suffered from the bends, and his internal body temperature raised to 35 centigrade. He sweated so much that sweat started sloshing around in the lower portion of his spacesuit. After a disastrous re-entry sent the crew landing in the Russian forest, waiting to be rescued for days, Leonov had lost six kilogrammes.
Three months later, the American Ed White also performed a space walk.
Today is the feast day of St Patrick, a Romano-British saint who brought Christianity to Ireland. It is derived from the supposed date of his death, 17 March, probably in 461 AD.
He was captured by Irish pirates as a teenager. Eventually escaping, he was able to return to his family where he had a vision imploring him to spread Christianity to Ireland.
Much of what we know about Patrick, however, is from himself. He may well have been accused of some financial impropriety, which is in part what his Confessio was written in defence of.
Above is the oldest known depiction of him (right), in a book by Jacobus de Voragine.
Source
But the classic idea of Caesar's parting words - poeticised as 'et tu Brute?' by Shakespeare - may not be very accurate. In this extract, Kathryn Tempest explores the interpretations of what Caesar could have meant - including that he was simply cursing Brutus - in her book Brutus: The Noble Conspirator.
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15 March 44 BC: Fearing Julius Caesar's growing power, senators plot to assassinate him. Despite several warnings, a reluctant Caesar is eventually convinced to meet them. They surround him under the pretense of discussing a petition. Once he can not escape, he is stabbed 23 times. Only one stab is actually a fatal blow.
Suetonius reports that he said nothing, but contemporaries speculate that Caesar spoke a Greek phrase: "Kai su, teknon?"
"You too, child?"
A jar for keeping medicinal leeches in (Samuel Alcock, Staffordshire, 19th century).
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March 10, 1865: Amy Spain, a black (probably mixed-race) slave, is hanged aged 17; she is the last known enslaved person in the United States to have been executed.
As the slave-owning Confederacy was collapsing, the Union army occupied her hometown of Darlington. The Union commander, seeing that almost all adult men had abandoned the town, allowed the remaining slaves to take whatever provisions and items they needed. Shortly afterwards Confederate troops re-took the town and she was accused of looting, tried, and executed.
The slightly sensationalist Harper's article is here.
The first mass observation of International Women's Day took place on 19 March 1911. Demonstrations took place across many European countries and in the US. Perhaps the most prominent was the demonstration around the Ringstraße in Vienna, which saw a turnout of 20,000 women and men. Pictured is the first IWD in Berlin.
The date was later moved to March 8th.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-death-stalin-180965119/
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Training with a movable camera gun (Lt. H.P. Kingsmore, US, 1918).
Source
Proposed naval ensign for the Union of Sweden and Norway, by Peter Petersen (1836).
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Also died recently is Fred Bailey, the last member of the Jedburgh teams living in Britain, who took part in sabotage actions during Operation Overlord in France.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2023/02/21/fred-bailey-soe-operative-who-supported-resistance-france-fought/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fobituaries%2F2023%2F02%2F21%2Ffred-bailey-soe-operative-who-supported-resistance-france-fought%2F
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
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We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
Nowrus (Novruz) in Azerbaijan SSR, 1989. Nowrus celebrates the Persian New Year, which normally falls on the 21st of March on the Gregorian calendar.
Source
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/alexei-leonov-first-person-spacewalk/
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Patrick was born in Bannavem Taburniae. Where this was is uncertain however.
Arguments have been put forwards for (in album order) Birdoswald or Ravenglass, both in Cumbria, England, Kilpatrick in Scotland, or Bannaventa in central England.
Wales has also been suggested, although there is no specific candidate.
A Maiko (apprentice geisha) called Hiroko reading a book (Japan, 1920s).
Source
https://antiquescientifica.com/web.bloodletting.leeches.htm
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Death tarot card (Bonifacio Bembo, Italy, ca. 1428-1447).
Source
International Women's Day in Vienna, 1929, with the sign saying "We do not want to be second class humans"
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It has been announced that this void was some sort of corridor, with a purpose currently unknown.
https://vimeo.com/hipinstitute/2023scanpyramidsreport
5 March 1953: Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR, dies at his dacha in Kuntsevo aged 74. His health had been declining since a series of strokes in 1945 and as a result of his consistent smoking.
Despite being in good spirits on the 1st of March, Stalin had retired to bed in the early morning and never appeared again. His guards claimed they had been given orders not to disturb him, although this excuse is dubious. In any case, when found in the late evening, Stalin was unconscious on the floor, incontinent, and with a high heart rate.
Ironically, several of the doctors called to his aid were those he had been persecuting under the 'Doctors' Plot'.
Probably in part due to lack of enthusiasm of those tasked with caring for him, on the 5th of March Stalin vomited blood everywhere and promptly expired.
V. Birchwood makes videos about historical fashion, and this video is very revealing about the psychology of historical clothing (and why she wears it).
https://youtu.be/b6ZIBQhdJyE
https://www.historynet.com/simone-segouin-famed-french-resistance-fighter-dies-at-97/
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