Category: Today

On February 10, 1870, the YMCA was founded in New York City. On the same date in 1964, Glenn Beck was born.

On February 9, 1991, voters in Lithuania voted for independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, confirming the declaration of the popularly elected Sąjūdis eleven months before.

On January 11, 1571, the freedom of religion is granted to . . . Austrian nobility.

On December 14, 1819, Alabama became the 22nd state of these United States. On the same December date in 1918, Friedrich Karl von Hessen, a German prince elected by the Parliament of Finland to become King Väinö I, renounced the Finnish throne. In 1939, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland and starting the Winter War.

On November 23, 1644, “Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England,” was published, and became a classic anti-censorship tract.

On November 16, 1776, the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (Netherlands) recognized the independence of the United States of America. The date in 1811 marks the birth of free trade advocate and British politician John Bright.

On November 10, 1821, the First Cry of Independence in the Villa de los Santos (a small town in the interior of the country) occurred in Panama. The November 10 date has since become Panama’s “Cry of Independence Day” in the country. November is a month of independence celebrations in Panama, but the November 10 celebration marks the first signs of the struggle for separation from Spain.

On November 9, 1998, capital punishment in the United Kingdom, previously abolished for murder, was completely abolished for all remaining capital offences.

On September 9, 1739, the largest slave uprising in Britain’s mainland North American colonies prior to the American Revolution erupted near Charleston, South Carolina. Jemmy, a literate slave — also called “Cato” — led 20 other enslaved Kongolese men to the Stono River, for which the event is named, the Stono Rebellion. (It is also sometimes called Cato’s Rebellion and Cato’s Conspiracy.) Several confrontations occurred, with less than a hundred deaths all told, before the rebellion was quelled.

The South Carolina legislature passed, as a response, the Negro Act of 1740, which restricted slave assembly, education and movement. It also enacted a 10-year moratorium against importing African slaves, and established penalties against slaveholders’ harsh treatment of slaves. The legislature also began regulating manumission.

On September 8, 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.