Author: Redactor

On May 4, 1796, American historian William H. Prescott was born. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and his Conquest of Peru remain classic works of well-researched, “scientific history.” Prescott, Arizona, was named in his honor.

In 1791, the Constitution of May 3, the first modern constitution in Europe, was proclaimed by the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

On May 3 in 1915, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae composed the poem “In Flanders Fields.”

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The tragedy of fascism and Nazism should have taught us that totalitarianism establishes itself through banal men, and the true antidote is a religion that prevents one from adoring men who pretend to be gods, for it teaches us to love instead the inner God of moral conscience, and to defend liberty with absolute devotion.

Maurizio Viroli, As If God Existed: Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2012).

On May 2, 1989, Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria, allowing a number of East Germans to defect.

The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, written by philosopher Benedetto Croce [pictured, above] in response to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals by Giovanni Gentile, sanctioned the unreconcilable split between the philosopher and the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, to which he had previously given a vote of confidence on October 31, 1922.

The manifesto was published by Il Mondo on May 1, 1925, which was Workers’ Day, symbolically responding to the publication of the Fascist manifesto on the Natale di Roma, the founding of Rome (celebrated on April 21). The Fascist press claimed that the Crocian manifesto was “more authoritarian” than its Fascist counterpart — a typical leftist dismissal of what used to be called “liberalism” — in Italian, liberismo — but which Croce dubbed liberism, to distinguish it from the dirigiste quasi-socialisms of self-described “liberals” of the time.