The Wampanoag

The Wampanoag are a Native American nation which currently consists of five tribes
1600 the Wampanoag lived in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as within a territory that encompassed current day Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands. Their population numbered about 12,000.


Historical Wampanoag leaders included:
Massasoit, who met the English;

Massasoit's oldest son Wamsutta (known by the English as King Alexander) who died under mysterious circumstances after visiting with English colonial administrators in Plymouth;

His second son Metacom or Metacomet (King Philip), who initiated the war against the English known as King Philip's War in retaliation for the death of his brother at the hands of the English;

Sachem Weetamoo of the Pocasset, a woman who supported Metacom and drowned crossing the Taunton River while fleeing the English;

Sachem Awashonks of the Sakonnet, a woman who at first fought the English but then changed sides; and

Annawan, a war leader.
 
Image:Philip, King of Mount Hope, 1772, by Paul Revere. Revere designed this pygmy-like image to make King Philip look repulsive

Cortes and Pizarro

The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this) the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a certain innocence, and when a Spanish armada appeared at Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man came ashore, with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought that he was the legendary Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with the promise to return-the mysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so they welcomed him, with munificent hospitality.

That was Hernando Cortes, come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. In the mind of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there must have been a certain doubt about whether Cortes was indeed Quetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortes, bearing enormous treasures, gold and silver wrought into objects of fantastic beauty, but at the same time begging him to go back. (The painter Durer a few years later described what he saw just arrived in Spain from that expedition-a sun of gold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.)

Cortes then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy-to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortes's small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands of the Spaniards.

All this is told in the Spaniards' own accounts.

In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used the same tactics, and for the same reasons- the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

Source: Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress, Howard Zinn

Selma to Montgomery marches

The Selma to Montgomery marches were three marches in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American Civil Rights Movement. They were the culmination of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, launched by Amelia Boynton and her husband. Boynton brought many prominent leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement to Selma, including James Bevel, who initiated and organized the march; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Hosea Williams.

The first march took place on March 7, 1965 — "Bloody Sunday" — when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. The second march took place on March 9. Only the third march, which began on March 21 and lasted five days, made it to Montgomery, 54 miles (87 km) away. This day will forever be known as Bloody Sunday, as policed forced the peaceful marchers to turn around and head back to Selma, they used tear gas and clubs to harm these peace marchers. African Americans were in a struggle to get voting rights listed in the United States Constitution, in Alabama half of the population was African Americans and only one percent of them were registered voters.

The route is memorialized as the Selma To Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a U.S. National Historic Trail.

Paul Revere

Paul Revere (bap. January 1, 1735 [O.S. December 22, 1734] – May 10, 1818)[1] was an American silversmith and a patriot in the American Revolution.

He was glorified after his death for his role as a messenger in the battles of Lexington and Concord, and Revere's name and his "midnight ride" are well-known in the United States as a patriotic symbol. In his lifetime, Revere was a prosperous and prominent Boston craftsman, who helped organize an intelligence and alarm system to keep watch on the British military.

Revere later served as an officer in the Penobscot Expedition, one of the most disastrous campaigns of the American Revolutionary War, a role for which he was later exonerated. After the war, he was early to recognize the potential for large-scale manufacturing of metal.

Revere's role was not particularly noted during his life. In 1861, over 40 years after his death, the ride became the subject of "Paul Revere's Ride", a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem has become one of the best known in American history and was memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Its famous opening lines are:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year

Painting: Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley,

The battles of Lexington and Concord

The battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. They were fought on April 19, 1775, in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy (present-day Arlington), and Cambridge, near Boston. The battles marked the outbreak of open armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in the mainland of British North America.

About 700 British Army regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, were given secret orders to capture and destroy military supplies that were reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. Through effective intelligence gathering, Patriot colonials had received word weeks before the expedition that their supplies might be at risk, and had moved most of them to other locations. They also received details about British plans on the night before the battle, and were able to rapidly notify the area militias of the military movement.

The first shots were fired just as the sun was rising at Lexington. The militia were outnumbered and fell back, and the regulars proceeded on to Concord, where they searched for the supplies. At the North Bridge in Concord, several hundred militiamen fought and defeated three companies of the King's troops. The outnumbered regulars fell back from the Minutemen after a pitched battle in open territory.

More militiamen arrived soon thereafter and inflicted heavy damage on the regulars as they marched back towards Boston. Upon returning to Lexington, Smith's expedition was rescued by reinforcements under Lieutenant-General Hugh Percy. The combined force, now of about 1,700 men, marched back to Boston under heavy fire in a tactical withdrawal and eventually reached the safety of Charlestown. The accumulated militias blockaded the narrow land accesses to Charlestown and Boston, starting the Siege of Boston.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his "Concord Hymn", described the first shot fired by the Patriots at the North Bridge as the "shot heard 'round the world," even though it was not the first shot of the war.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of the Danish National Church. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives, focusing on the priority of concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.[4] His theological work focuses on Christian ethics and the institution of the Church.[5] His psychological works explore the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices.

As part of his philosophical method, inspired by Socrates and the Socratic dialogues, Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonymous characters who present their own distinctive viewpoints and interact with each other in complex dialogue.[7] He assigns pseudonyms to explore particular viewpoints in-depth, which may take up several books in some instances, and Kierkegaard, or another pseudonym, critiques that position. Thus, the task of discovering the meaning of his works is left to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Subsequently, scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as, among others, an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist. Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.

Riksdag and Mona Sahlin

The Riksdag (officially Swedish: Sveriges riksdag, literally: The National Diet of Sweden) is the national legislative assembly of Sweden. The riksdag is a unicameral assembly with 349 members (Swedish: riksdagsledamöter), who are elected on a proportional basis to serve fixed terms of four years. The Riksdag building stands on the island of Helgeandsholmen in Stockholm.

In 1995 it was revealed that the Swedish politician Mona Sahlin had bought, among other things, two bars of Toblerone using her Riksdag credit card. This became known as the Toblerone affair. Sahlin was forced to step down as a candidate for the post as Prime Minister. She returned to politics in 1998 (In October 1995 the newspaper Expressen revealed that Sahlin, who was then serving as Deputy Prime Minister and was widely seen as the main candidate to succeed Ingvar Carlsson as Prime Minister, had charged more than 50,000 Swedish kronor for private expenses on her working charge card, which was only for working expenses.[3] She had used the card to buy clothes, and to rent a private car (the money was always repaid, and Sahlin described how she saw use of the card as "advance pay"). Sahlin also claimed that the work charge card and her private charge card looked exactly the same and that some of the work charges were unintentionally debited as personal expenses. Sahlin decided to take the case to court to prove her innocence and be cleared of all accusations of misconduct. During this controversy it was also revealed that Sahlin had many unpaid parking fines at the Swedish Enforcement Administration, and that she often had missed or been late in paying her children's kindergarten fees.[4]

On 16 October 1995 Sahlin declared that she would take a time out from politics, and on 10 November she announced her resignation from the Swedish government as well as the Social Democratic Party leadership candidacy.[4] She left her seat in the parliament in April 1996 but continued to sit as a member of the executive council of the Social Democrats. The criminal charges against her were eventually dropped. The controversy was dubbed as the "Toblerone affair" after a statement Sahlin made during a press conference when she said: "I bought two Toblerone, diapers and cigarettes".

In 1996 Sahlin's autobiography Med mina ord ("With My Words") was published. The book dealt mostly with the Toblerone affair)