Peacebuttons.info has served the peace-left community for decades, providing high-quality social justice buttons and the thoughtful series Today in Peace and Justice History. Please support them; the buttons are primo.
Be part of the apparent few working not to repeat history’s mistakes. Check in often and learn about the past so you can help build a better future and a green new world.
Today in Peace and Justice History
Dec. 28, 1869
The (Noble and Holy Order of the) Knights of Labor, a labor union formed by tailors in Philadelphia, held the first Labor Day ceremonies in American history. Led by Uriah S. Stephens, they advocated, and end to child and convict labor, equal pay for women, a progressive income tax and cooperative ownership of mines and factories by management and workers. They organized among the growing mass of industrial workers, their motto, “An Injury to One Is the Concern of All.”
Dec. 28, 1968
An anti-draft conference launched a “Don’t Register” campaign to resist Australia’s conscription system.
Dec. 28, 1973
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956,” was published in Paris in the original Russian. The book is a brutal and uncompromising first-hand description of political repression and terror in the Soviet Union and its forced-labor prison camp system, where the author spent eight years. He dedicated it “to all those who did not live to tell it.”
Solzhenitsyn was again arrested and forced into exile within two months of publication.
Read more about the Soviet gulags
Dec. 28, 1981
A peace camp was set up at the Molesworth Royal Air Force base in Cambridgeshire in the United Kingdom. Led by men and women from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and inspired by the encampment at Greenham Common, it was set up to protest the siting of 64 U.S. ground-launched nuclear-armed cruise missiles at the base.
Their songs
Dec. 28, 1996
Three were arrested at the Capitol Hill Post Office in Seattle for refusing to leave after attempting to mail humanitarian supplies to Iraq in defiance of the U.S.-led embargo.
Read more about sanctions against Iraq
Dec. 29, 1890
The U.S. Army killed approximately 300 Miniconju Sioux (another of the Teton Sioux tribes). They had fled after the murder of Sitting Bull and sought refuge on the Oglala reservation of Pine Ridge at Wounded Knee, in the new state of South Dakota.
The 7th Cavalry (Custer’s old command) fired their artillery amidst mostly unarmed women, children, and fleeing men. The Wounded Knee Massacre was the final major military battle in the genocide against Native Americans. 18 soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for their “bravery.” Encroaching white settlement after finding gold in 1874 on Sioux lands led to conflicts.
We remember Wounded Knee
The Great Sioux Agreement of 1889 established reservations for the native inhabitants and encouraged further white settlement on Indian land.
Other perspectives and sad, disturbing photos
Dec. 29, 1996
War-weary guerrilla and government leaders in Guatemala signed an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict.
Post Comment