Anniversaries and commemorations come and go daily. Most of us, even the best historians, miss most occasions. If we think of history as events then we are faced with a continually showering in the grains of sand. Nevertheless, we do pick out certain patterns in the remembrance of historical dates. The blog here reminds us of some dates where the local, state, national, and global perspectives entwine.
What Time is It? It is flow of a sandstorm that will on each day compress somewhere into a structure – sandstone, selected and only remembered in the longue durée.
On Monday, 19 April 1920, Start of the San Remo conference: Representatives of Italy, France, the United Kingdom and Japan meet to determine the League of Nations mandates for administration of territories, following the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.
On Monday, 19 April 1920, Germany and Bolshevist Russia agree to the exchange of prisoners of war.
On Thursday, 19 April 1945, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, a musical play based on Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, opens on Broadway and becomes their second long-running stage classic.
On Tuesday, 19 April 1960, April Revolution: South Korean students hold a nationwide pro-democracy protest against President Syngman Rhee, eventually leading him to resign from that office.
On Wednesday, 19 April 1995, Oklahoma City bombing: 168 people, including 8 Federal Marshals and 19 children, are killed at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and 680 wounded by a bomb set off by Timothy McVeigh and one of his accomplices, Terry Nichols.
Images Citations in Composite: ID 17208541 © Anhong | Dreamstime.com; ID 35001957 © DiversityStudio1 | Dreamstime.com; ID 156394527 © Gerd Zahn | Dreamstime.com
Neville Buch