Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided as an advocate of politically-motivated murder and violent revolution by her critics. Born in the province of Kaunas, Lithuania she moved with her sister Helena to Rochester, New York in the United States at the age of sixteen. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket Riot, Goldman was trained by Johann Most in public speaking and became a renowned lecturer, attracting crowds of thousands. The writer and anarchist Alexander Berkman became her lover, lifelong intimate friend and comrade. Together they planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Though Frick survived, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. In 1917 Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested - with hundreds of others - and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. Eventually she traveled to Spain to participate in that nation's civil war. She died in Toronto on 14 May 1940.
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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1713: With no living male heirs, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction to ensure one of his daughters would inherit the Habsburg monarchy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_VI%2C_Holy_Roman_Emperor)
1775: The American Revolutionary War began with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Lexington_and_Concord)
1943: Nazi German troops entered the Warsaw Ghetto to round up the remaining Jews, sparking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first mass uprising in Poland against the Nazi occupation during the Holocaust. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising)
1971: The first space station, Salyut 1, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam, Kazakh SSR, USSR. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_1)
1984: Scottish-born composer Peter Dodds McCormick's "Advance Australia Fair", a patriotic song that was first performed in 1878, officially replaced "God Save the Queen" as Australia's national anthem. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Australia_Fair)
1995: A car bomb was detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, killing 168 people and injuring over 800 others. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing)
_____________________ Wiktionary's Word of the day:
espalier: A horticultural technique using pruning and shaping to train the branches of a tree or shrub into a two-dimensional ornamental design, as along a wall or fence. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/espalier)
_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:
When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don't turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist. -- Albert Hofmann (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann)