Category: Today

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.

On July 12, 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born. He would go on to become one of the leading figures in America’s Transcendentalist movement, most famously writing Walden: or, Life in the Woods [cabin pictured]. His defense of John Brown deeply affected later interpretations of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, and his “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” protesting the Mexican-​American War, has become a classic not only of protest but of political theory. 

On July 11, 1804, U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr [pictured] shot former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who died within days. The shooting was a duel of honor in which Burr had challenged Hamilton. But in a sense Burr lost, for Hamilton had left a letter that made him seem almost a martyr. The letter may have been less than veracious, but it was effective, and popular opinion quickly turned on Burr.

On July 11, 1909, mathematician, astronomer, and economist Simon Newcomb died. On this date in 1960, Harper Lee’s classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” is published. 

July 11 is World Population Day, an event cooked up by the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme in 1989. The day may be a propagandistic tool of the international statist elite, but freedom-​lovers could celebrate by promoting the anti-​Malthusian population writings of Nassau Senior, Herbert Spencer, and Julian Simon.