#OnThisDay, 16 Jan 1970, Dilma Rousseff, a member of the Brazilian guerrilla movement against the military government, was arrested. She was labelled the “Joan of Arc” of the movement.
In 2011 she became the first woman to be president of Brazil.
#OnThisDay, 26 Dec 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced their discovery of radium.
In 1903, Marie, Pierre and Henri Becquerel received the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on radiation. Marie was the first woman to receive the award.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #WomensHistory #WomenInSTEM #NobelWomen #Histodons
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#OnThisDay, 29 Jan 1891, Liliʻuokalani is sworn in as Queen of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
She is the first, and only, regnant queen of the country and is deposed in a coup in 1893 that was supported by the US marines.
#RegnantWomen #WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons
#OnThisDay, 30 Jan 1913, Ida B Wells forms the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, Illinois, to give a voice to Black women who had been excluded by national suffrage organisations because of their race.
In March 1913, the club headed to Washington DC to take part in the national Women’s Suffrage Procession. They were told to march at the back, in a segregated section, so as not to upset white southern women.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons
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The Book of Negroes is more than a ledger—it is a story pressed into parchment, a testament to the brutal arithmetic of freedom. It begins in the final days of the American Revolution, a conflict that promised liberty but delivered it unevenly.
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#History #BlackMastodon #Education #Histodons #Politics
Image: Rose Fortune came to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War, about June 1784. She earned a living as a "trucker," carrying baggage with a wheelbarrow.
NOVA SCOTIA ARCHIVES
#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly. Hewish received the Nobel prize for it in 1974: Bell Burnell did not.
In 2018 Bell Burnell received a £3m prize for her work. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
#OnThisDay, 15 Feb 1776, Hannah Cowley’s first play, The Runaway, opened at Drury Lane.
Cowley had written her play and sent it to David Garrick, Drury Lane’s manager, after sitting through a particularly rubbish play. Garrick cast a young Sarah Siddons in the lead.
Siddon’s character rails against the marriage vows: 'I won't hear of it, “love” one might manage that perhaps, but “honour, obey”!’
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons #BritishHistory
#OnThisDay, 19 March 1944, Yvonne Baseden parachutes into Nazi-occupied France as a Special Operations Executive radio operator. The British SOE supported the French resistance. Radio operators ran the greatest risk of discovery as their position could be triangulated when they were transmitting.
Baseden was captured and sent to Ravensbrück.
She was the subject of the first regular UK edition of This Is Your Life in 1955.
#WomenInHistory #WomensHistoryMonth #History #WorldWar2 #Histodons
1968. Charleston, South Carolina.
Fannie Lou Hamer, who Lyndon Baines Johnson allegedly called “that ignorant woman,” speaks:
“People is not just walking out like they used to do in the past—walking up and shooting a man down and getting maybe two or three hundred people carryin’ out and lynching you…”
“But it’s in a more settled way now.
They let you starve to death. Not give you jobs.”
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In 1775, hundreds of enslaved men in Virginia fled their plantations and joined the British in exchange for a single promise: freedom. They formed the Ethiopian Regiment—the first Black fighting force of the American Revolution. This is the story of how they marched under a banner that read Liberty to Slaves, and what became of them in a single, searing year.
Caption: Troiani, Don. Brave Men as Ever Fought. Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia.
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#histodons #history #education
From 1860 to 1912, Democrats won the White House only twice, while losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College two other times.
The country was intensely partisan and divided over tariffs and immigration. Sound familiar?
https://theconversation.com/a-warning-for-democrats-from-the-gilded-age-and-the-1896-election-250887
#USPolitics @histodons #Histodons
📜 The Wild Man of the Revolution, Samuel Adams.
I wrote an essay about Samuel Adams and why I think he was punk rock. I'm convinced he'd love the band Fugazi and that he'd sing their lyrics while tossing tea in Boston harbor.
When he died, there were no flags, no procession, no cannon fire. William “Billy” Lee was always there—riding with Washington in war, walking beside him in peace. He served at Cambridge, Valley Forge, Yorktown—silent, indispensable. But when the story of Washington was told, Billy was left out of the frame. His life was one of duty without recognition, loyalty without reward.
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#history #histodons #education #Politics #BlackMastodon
"Billy Lee, Portrait in Tar." 2016. Titus Kaphar.
#OnThisDay, 20 Apr 1902, Maria Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie refine radium chlorine. The discovery leads to Marie being the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.
The Academy originally planned to award only Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Pierre insisted that Marie should also be included.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomenInSTEM #NobelWomen #Histodons
#OnThisDay, 9 May 1922, the International Astronomical Union formally adopts Annie Jump Cannon's stellar classification system. The principles in it still underpin modern classification.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Astronomy #WomenInSTEM #AmericanHistory #Histodons
"I've never worked so hard in my life than when I was US Treasurer. I knew I had to make good on behalf of American women."
#OnThisDay, 3 Jun 1949, Georgia Neese Clark Gray becomes the first woman to be Treasurer of the USA.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons
#OnThisDay, 15 May 1946, Camilla Williams makes her operatic debut as Cio-Cio San with the New York City Opera. She is the first Black woman to sign a contract with a major US opera company.
Read more: https://carvehername.org.uk/eight-famous-women-singers/
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #BlackHistory #Histodons
#OnThisDay, 16 May 1975, Japanese climber Junko Tabei reaches the summit of Everest. She is the first woman to make it to the peak of the world's highest mountain.
#OnThisDay, 18 May 1953, pilot Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AviationHistory #Histodons
This past week, 99 years ago, Miles Dewey Davis III was born in Alton, Illinois.
On November 12, 1989, on 60 Minutes, Harry Reasoner asked him if Black musicians were better at jazz and blues because of slavery. The question could’ve gone sideways.
What Davis said—quietly, precisely—was about rhythm, memory, race, and the meaning of swing. #music #Jazz #Histodons #history #blackmastodon #photography #blackandwhite
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Image: Miles Davis, Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954, photo by Francis Wolff.
#OnThisDay, 10 Jun 1963, the US President signed the Equal Pay Act into law, witnessed by members of the American Association of University Women. [photo JFK Library]
Obviously, just because a law exists, doesn't mean pay is now equal.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons
“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.”
#OnThisDay, 19 May 1952, Lillian Hellman writes to the House of UnAmerican Activities refusing to testify against others.
In the 1940s, Hellman had been twice nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplays. As a result of refusing to testify about others to HUAC, she was blacklisted by Hollywood.
#HollywoodHistory #AmericanHistory #WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons
#OnThisDay, 3 Jun 1924, Alfonsina Strada crosses the finish line of the Giro d'Italia. She remains the only woman to have officially ridden a full length Grand Tour.
At one point she had been disqualified on time grounds but was allowed to continue without the option of prizes. She finished ahead of the lantern rouge (the last cyclist to finish).
This year's Giro d'Italia for women is 939km, compared to 3443km for the men's race.
“Have ye come far?”
“Only from America.”
#OnThisDay, 21 May 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman - and only the second person - to fly solo and without stops across the Atlantic.
She lands unexpectedly in Ireland. There’s some wonderful images of her here: https://joecampbellart.com/2015/03/12/amelia-earhart-in-ireland-solo-atlantic-crossing-may-21st-1932/
Watch newsreel of her taking off here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-itPeJOyzI
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AviationHistory @histodons #Histodons
Das neue Netzwerk »Historiker*innen für eine demokratische Gesellschaft« (#hist4dem) kommunizierte bislang lediglich auf Bluesky und Instagram (ausgerechnet!); nun gibt es immerhin eine Brücke ins Fediverse:
@hist4dem.bsky.social
Mehr zum Netzwerk hier: https://hist4dem.de/
@histodons @historikerinnen
@academicchatter @archivistodon @arthistory @bookstodon @earlymodern @envhist
@historyofmedicine @histstm @intellectualhistory @medievodons @museum @neuSoM
