365 days 

1 April
‘Sam Larned, it is said, steadily refused to drink milk on the ground that his relations with the cow did not justify him in drawing on her reserves

1 February
‘Negro student demonstrations against segregated eating facilities have raised grave questions in the South over the future of the region’s race relations.

1 January
The only successful large-scale slave revolt in history culminated in a declaration of independence and the establishment of a free republic on new year’s day 1804.

1 July
’Whatever was gained, it wasn’t worth the price the men had to paid to gain that advantage. It was no advantage to anybody. It was just sheer bloody murder. That’s the only words you can use for it.’
Corporal Harry Shaw, Royal Welsh Fusiliers

1 June
‘And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?’
Aint I A Woman speech by Sojourner Truth as recorded by Frances Gage

1 March
By 1 March 1912 the national coal strike had begun with over one million miners out on strike calling for a minimum wage

1 May
It’s Mayday, Beltane, International Workers Day – and the anniversary of the suppression of the traditional May Fayre in what is now Mayfair

10 April
¡Tierra y Libertad!

10 February
’To unscramble a complicated posture for purposes of classification, turn the partners round mentally and see if they can finish up face to face in a matrimonial without crossing legs.

10 January
One copy of it was sold for every three people in the country in its first year of publication. Yet its author died lonely, embittered and almost forgotten.

10 June
Today in 1942, the small Czech mining village of Lidice was wiped off the map

10 March
Suffragette Mary ’slasher’ Richardson attacks Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver on this day in 1914

10 May
Ni doctrine, ni foi, ni loi

11 April
‘Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations, reduce them to a lowly standard.’
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte

11 February
’To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.’

11 January
Four months after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, on 11 January 2002, the first detainees are flown into Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, the US military base on the south-east coast of Cuba.

11 June
‘I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring.

11 March
Up the Rebels!

11 May
What was the biggest medical advance of the 20th century?

12 April
‘It’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the best seller’s list.’

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