At 3.05am on this day in 1917, in Butte, Montana, six masked men burst into the boarding house room of labour leader Frank Little, pulled him out of his bed, beat him, tied him to the bumper of a car, … Continue reading
When people blithely wonder how millions of Holocaust victims went to their deaths without resisting, they display a total ignorance of the impeccable organisation, military might and web of deception behind the Nazi’s Final Solution. While there were multiple ghetto … Continue reading
Today we honour Arthur Lee – the African American protest singer, metaphysical poet and leader of LA’s pioneering psychedelic refuseniks Love – who quit this planet on this day in 2006 after an arduous battle with cancer. Like Lou Reed, … Continue reading
On this day in 1948, Mileva Maric died alone and unknown in Zurich aged seventy-two. “Few stories in the history of science are as heartbreaking [as hers],” claimed the New Scientist. A brilliant woman born in the late 19th century, … Continue reading
Today we recall the social theorist and world-changer, Friedrich Engels – co-author of The Communist Manifesto and profound contributor to Das Kapital – but chiefly remembered as the lifelong friend, literary executor and “junior partner” of Karl Marx. At 24, Engels looked set … Continue reading
On 6th August 1945, the United States government unleashed upon the world the first weapon of mass destruction when the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Exploding with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tonnes of … Continue reading
“Who, after all, speaks, today, of the extermination of Armenians?” asked Adolf Hitler in 1939. But, then as now, even less speak of the genocide of the Assyrians – the torchbearers of the earliest civilisation – who fell victim to the same … Continue reading
On this day in 1897, in the tiny Spanish spa town of Santa Agueda, Spain’s autocratic and much-hated prime minister Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated: gunned down as a final act of revenge by an Italian anarchist who could no … Continue reading
It can be surprising to discover that so thoroughly indoctrinated were the Germans under Hitler’s Nazis that their cruelty towards non-Nazis did not halt abruptly in May 1945, as Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, Hohernzollerns alike awoke from their collective psychosis. Instead … Continue reading
With nothing to report today, let us consider the written words of President Woodrow Wilson after signing the Federal Reserve into existence in 1913: “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation … Continue reading
On this day in 1958, the owner of Kansas’s state-wide Rexall drugstores walked into Dockum’s, his flagship store in downtown Wichita. Observing a group of young black students sitting peacefully at the lunch counter, after several minutes of consideration, he … Continue reading
On This Deity today proudly presents a love story of lust and adventure; the story of Jane Elizabeth Digby, who died on this day in 1881; a woman who did her own thing, when doing one’s own thing was very much … Continue reading
On this day in 1827, William Blake died as he had lived, in poverty and obscurity. What can be said about this visionary, mystic, prophet, poet, painter, engraver, and World Artist? The neglect that one of the Greatest-Evers suffered in his … Continue reading
Today we celebrate the social reformer, prophet and science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, who died on this day aged 79. Probably best remembered for his visionary novels The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, and for his … Continue reading
On this August day on which no great act occurred worthy of commemorating as an On This Deity entry, let’s take this opportunity to remind ourselves of the two ancient world tyrants – Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar – both of … Continue reading
On this day in 1889, a fateful and momentous meeting of two exceptional minds occurred in a café in New York City’s Lower East Side. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, or John and Yoko, the reaction between the two was instant … Continue reading
On this day in 1819, during a pro-democracy rally in Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field, utter bloody carnage fell upon the peaceful protestors when the local yeomanry set about the crowd of 60,000 with sabres drawn, trampling and hacking down fifteen … Continue reading
On this day in 1963, two young Spanish anarchists were executed by General Franco’s obscene regime for a Passport Office bombing of which they had no knowledge, while the real perpetrators slipped quietly away. Despite the absence of any evidence … Continue reading
Today we remember the extraordinary and explosive life of Dambudzo Marechera, the Zimbabwean ‘enfant terrible of African literature’ who on this day in 1987 died homeless, penniless and sick from AIDS on the streets of Harare at the age of … Continue reading
Throughout his all too short but trailblazing life, death had been his central artistic theme – and on this day in 1936, at the age of thirty-eight, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca met the violent fate he … Continue reading
An entry on the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring will appear here shortly.
On this day in 1831, Nat Turner – a slave and lay preacher from Virginia – calmly explained to six of his fellow slaves that the moment had come for him not only to lead his people out of bondage, … Continue reading
On this day in 1989, revolutionary leader and co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton was shot and killed when a drug deal went wrong. He was forty-seven years old. After his glory years in the 1960s during which time Newton … Continue reading
On this day in 1927, the American State murdered two Italian anarchists in the despicable ‘electric chair’, after the two lost their six-year battle to clear their names of a crime they most certainly did not commit – and despite … Continue reading
Today we recall the brief, peculiar and tragic life of Thomas Chatterton – English poet, forger of medieval poetry and proto-Romantic – who, aged just seventeen years and nine months old, poisoned himself with arsenic rather than die of starvation … Continue reading
Who dares to celebrate the death in an insane asylum of this radical thinker, whose works – admittedly violated, even in places re-written, by his self-serving sister – contributed so much of demerit to the vile Nazi war machine of … Continue reading
Lest we forget that a mere century ago the world was still so entirely male dominated that we women were not even allowed to vote. While our most adventurous brothers were becoming heroes of the so-called Free World by flying … Continue reading
Today we recall the long, eventful and totally full-on life of W.E.B. Du Bois, the foremost champion of equal rights for blacks in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, who died on this day in 1963 … Continue reading
At about 2.30 am on 28th August 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till was kidnapped at gunpoint from his great-uncle’s house in Money, Mississippi. His kidnappers then drove to a disused plantation shed in neighboring Sunflower County, where they brutally … Continue reading
Today in 1969, and just twelve months after Women’s Libbers first burned a bra at an Atlantic City protest against inequality, a new kind of World Revolutionary was born when twenty-five-year-old Leila Khaled of the PFLP (Popular Front for the … Continue reading
It was in the 4th century immediately after the Roman Empire became a de facto Christian state that the first anti-homosexual laws appeared. Thereafter, for the next 1500 years, the criminalisation of homosexuality spread voraciously and plague-like across the whole … Continue reading
On 30th August 1918, as Vladimir Lenin left a factory where he’d just delivered a speech to workers, a female revolutionary by the name of Fanya Kaplan – disillusioned by the manner in which Lenin had assumed dictatorial powers and … Continue reading
No great action has thus far occurred on this day that warrants an On This Deity entry. Budding politicos and future revolutionaries please therefore take note of 31st August for all potential world-changing international incidents.
An alternative "On This Day", On This Deity aims to bring light to and celebrate Culture Heroes, Outsider Icons, Beloved Immortals and Revolutionary Events in history.
Disclaimer: These are spirited and informed opinion pieces. Photos have been credited wherever possible, which hasn’t often been the case. Please contact me (via Comments) if you are the photographer of any pictures used by On This Deity and would like your photo to be credited or removed.
