A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1919, Marxist theorist, anti-war activist, and economist Rosa Luxemburg died.

“Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a revolutionary Marxist in the German SPD. She was often deeply critical of the leadership of her own party because she believed it was becoming too dominated by short-term reforms and was losing sight of the ultimate goal of socialist revolution. However, she believed in mass action by the working class as the way of bringing about change and was critical of Lenin’s concept of a vanguard party. In 1903, she attacked it for ultra-centralism, which she equated with the ‘sterile spirit of the overseer:

Lenin’s concern is not so much to make the activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party – to narrow the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than unify it.

Once the Russian Revolution took place, she gave it cautious support and was a leading figure in the German Communist Party when it was established in December 1918. However, the next month she (and Karl Liebknecht, another prominent figure in the new party) were arrested by German cavalry officers, who were suppressing a revolutionary uprising. Both were murdered while in custody, so Luxemburg did not live to witness the subsequent development of the Soviet system and the uses that would be made of the Leninist party.” — From ‘Socialism: A Very Short Introduction’ by Michael Newman

[Pg. 40-1 — From ‘Socialism: A Very Short Introduction’ by Michael Newman]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1959, the United Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, an expansion of the document first adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, in an attempt to protect and promote child rights all over the world.

“In addition to direct aid to children and their families, the United Nations has passed resolutions and initiated treaties establishing and attempting to enforce children’s rights. Going far beyond the 1924 and 1959 declarations, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child offered a wide-ranging affirmation that the best interests of the child should guide all policies and decisions regarding childhood. The convention’s forty articles reflect all of the concerns, values, and issues that had swirled around the idea of childhood throughout the previous century, including health, education, freedom of speech and religion, and the right to a name and nationality. The UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child oversees the enforcement of its provisions. Although the United States was involved in the drafting of the convention, it remained the only nation not to have ratified it as of 2017. Although the convention’s many qualifications made it sound like an agreement among lawyers recognizing the complications of trying to issue dictums applicable to dozens of political and legal systems, it had far more teeth than other efforts to provide protection for all the world’s children.

In addition to primary care programs related to nutrition and health, the UN has worked to eliminate child marriage, provide standards for children’s rights within families and the treatment of refugees, eliminate child prostitution and child pornography, and discourage the exploitation of children in armed conflicts. Despite these efforts, and the decided improvements they brought to millions of children’s lives, economic, military, and environmental conditions keep many children in distress. In 2000 an estimated 100 million school-age children were out of school, 50 million were working in harsh conditions, 30 million were involved in sex trades, 150 million were malnourished, and millions more had been orphaned by or suffered from AIDS.” — From ‘The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction’ by James Marten

[Pg. 105-6 — From ‘The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction’ by James Marten.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1902, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is published for the first time in a single volume, previously having only appeared serially in Blackwood’s Magazine.

“Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is considered by many to be the ultimate ‘modernist’ novel, a work of great complexity designed to reflect the complexity of experience we find in the real world. The thread running through the book, Africa’s Congo River, helps to lend both direction and form to its uncertainties. The story is a simple quest, an adventurous journey upriver by one man, Marlow, in search of another, Kurtz. This is a physical journey, into a continent along a river, but also a moral and political journey, confronting the harsh realities of colonialism (Kurtz is a lost agent who works for a Belgian company involved in the ivory trade). The journey also works on another level still, becoming a psychological trip, undertaken by Marlow and the reader, in which we descend into ourselves to confront our basic drives and impulses, weaknesses and needs, a descent into the underworld that is the ‘Heart of Darkness’.

The book is constructed as a tale within a tale, the narrative beginning on the estuary of the River Thames, where four men sit on the deck of a ship listening to Marlow tell his story of a trip to Africa in his youth. The setting allows the implications of what happens in the ‘dark places’ of a far-away continent to reverberate through the seemingly safe and comfortable world of the audience.” — From ‘Rivers: A Very Short Introduction’ by Nick Middleton.

[Pg. 80-1 — From ‘Rivers: A Very Short Introduction’ by Nick Middleton.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1984, President Ronald Reagan is re-elected in a landslide election against Walter Mondale.

“One of the most symbolically important neoliberal reforms undertaken by the Reagan administration was its attempt to privatize large portions of federally owned land. It is a relatively unknown fact that about 50% of the lands west of the Rocky Mountains are owned by the US federal government. The President argued that these lands had been ‘underused’ and would be managed more productively were they to be transferred into private hands. Consistent with Thatcher’s neoliberal claim that the transfer of public resources to private investors meant better management and increased productivity, Reagan asserted that revenues generated from the land sales could be used for servicing the public debt. In 1983, however, the privatization scheme came to a swift and unexpected close when many federal legislators, and even officials in the executive branch, were reluctant to sell off property under their control and management. Indeed, supporters of privatization within the administration itself failed to adequately identify key constituencies in building broader legislative and administrative support for the privatization initiative. Yet, on a symbolic level, the proposed land-sale initiatives underscored the high premium that neoliberalism places on private ownership.” — From ‘Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction’ by Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy

[Pg. 34 — From ‘Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction’ by Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1869, Indian activist Mohandas Gandhi was born.

“Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in the coastal town of Porbandar, one of scores of tiny princely states and now part of the Indian state of Gujarat. Although the Gandhis, meaning grocers, were merchants by caste, they had risen to important political positions. Mohandas’s father was the chief administrator and member of the court of Porbandar, and his grandfather that of the adjacent tiny state of Junagadh.

Gandhi grew up in an eclectic religious environment. His parents were followers of the largely devotional Hindu cult of Vishnu (or Vaishnavites). His mother belonged to the Pranami sect, which combined Hindu and Muslim religious beliefs, gave equal honour to the sacred books of the Vaishnavites and the Koran, and preached religious harmony. Her religious fasts and vows, observed without exception all her life, left an abiding impression on her son. His father’s friends included many Jains who preached a strict doctrine of nonviolence and self-discipline. Gandhi was also exposed to Christian missionaries, but Christianity was not a significant presence in his childhood.” — From ‘Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction’ by Bhikhu Parekh

[Pg. 1 — From ‘Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction’ by Bhikhu Parekh.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 476, Romulus Agustulus, the last Western Roman Emperor, abdicated his throne to the barbarian king Odoacer.

“Theodahad was a recent and insecure ruler. He was first the colleague, then the murderer, of his cousin Amalasuntha, who became queen regent for her son when her father Theoderic died in 526. Theoderic the Ostrogoth, the man with a moustache (worth mentioning because Latin has no word for one), was sole ruler of Italy for thirty years, from the early 490s. According to Marcellinus, a loyal follower of Justinian, the last Roman emperor in the west was deposed in 476: he had the splendid name Romulus Augustulus, which combines Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, with a diminutive of Augustus, the title of Rome’s first emperor and of all subsequent emperors. But 476 was not necessarily the end of Roman rule in the west, for there were still potential emperors, there were wealthy and well-connected senators in Rome, there was a Roman emperor at Constantinople who might be convinced to intervene, and there were debates about religion which might give him a reason to do so.” — From ‘Late Antiquity: A Very Short Introduction’ by Gillian Clark

[Pg 91-2 — From ‘Late Antiquity: A Very Short Introduction’ by Gillian Clark.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1831, former slave Nat Turner led a slave uprising that would have a profound impact in American history.  

“Fears of slave revolts intensified following a failed insurrection planned by Charleston free black Denmark Vesey in 1822 and an actual rebellion organized by slave Nat Turner in 1831 in which seventy or so of his followers killed fifty-seven whites in a house-to-house rampage. In the hysterical reaction caused by Turner’s rebellion, it became impossible in the South to discuss ending slavery. Turner’s rebellion, as well as escaped slave memoirs such as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), and other accounts of slave resistance reinforced antislavery opinion in the North by expanding politics beyond simple party allegiance.”— From ‘American Political History: A Very Short Introduction’ by Donald T. Critchlow

 [Pg 47 – From ‘American Political History: A Very Short Introduction’ by Donald T. Critchlow.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1846, Henry David Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay taxes, an act which inspired his Civil Disobedience three years later.

“Thoreau was briefly jailed in 1846 for refusing to pay his taxes, in protest against the Mexican War and the southern slave owners who supported it. His Civil Disobedience (1849), defending passive resistance to unjust laws, has inspired generations of reformers and activists. In Walden (1854), a record of his two years living in a cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau reflected on contemporary life in a nation experiencing rapid social and technological changes.”— From ‘American History: A Very Short Introduction’ by Paul S. Boyer

[Pg 67-8 – ‘From ‘American History: A Very Short Introduction’ by Paul S. Boyer.]

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