On January 5, 1531, Pope Clement VII sends a letter to King Henry VIII of England forbidding him to remarry under penalty of excommunication. Henry, who was looking for a way out of his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, ignored the pope’s warning. He went on to marry Anne Boleyn (and four subsequent wives), leading to his excommunication and one of the most significant schisms in the history of Christianity.

Source: history.com for the complete article

President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over tape recordings and documents that had been subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee. Marking the beginning of the end of his presidency, Nixon would resign from office in disgrace eight months later. READ MORE: 7 Revealing Nixon …read more

Similar to Adolf Hitler, Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini did not become the dictator of a totalitarian regime overnight. For several years, he and his allies worked more or less within the confines of the Italian constitution to accrue power, eroding democratic institutions until the moment came for them to be done away with entirely. It is generally agreed that that moment came in speech Mussolini gave to the Italian parliament on January 3, 1925, in which he asserted his right to supreme power and effectively became the dictator of Italy.

Mussolini had been a schoolteacher and an avowed socialist, but after World War I he became a leader of the nascent Fascist movement. Like much of Europe, Italy was rife with social turmoil in the wake of the war, with paramilitary groups and street gangs frequently clashing over their competing visions for the new political order. A close confidant of Mussolini formed a Fascist paramilitary group, known as the Blackshirts or squadristi, as Mussolini led the political party, and they found that government fears of a communist revolution allowed them to operate without state intervention. By 1921, Mussolini had been elected to parliament as the leader of the growing National Fascist Party.

Source: history.com

In memory, on National Science Fiction Day

On September 2, 2020, almost 50 years after she sold her first story, and more than 14 years after her death, Octavia E. Butler finally fulfilled her own prophecy and became a New York Times bestseller: Butler’s post-apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower, which was originally published in 1993 (but is set in the early 2020s), appeared at #14 on the list. 

Not that Butler had anything to prove before this, mind you. After all, in 1995 Butler became the first SF writer to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant; her work has been honored with Hugos and Nebulas; she is in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. She was a prescient thinker, a beloved teacher and mentor, and has become an enduring cultural icon, complete with Google doodle. There’s even a Mars landing site named after her.

Octavia was also very good at writing author bios. (Don’t laugh; they’re hard.) More importantly, perhaps, she has inspired countless writers and artists who came after her—from Nnedi Okorafor to Janelle Monáe and even Brit Marling, who cites Parable of the Sower in particular as informing her work on The OA. Butler is becoming one of those writers who gets continually rediscovered and re-evaluated, but for fans old and new, it’s a very verdant period for Butler’s work—both Parable of the Sower and Kindred will soon be adapted for the screen, and gorgeous new editions and new nonfiction about the writer abound. It would be the Octaviassance, except for the fact that for many of us, she never went away. 

Source:

lithub.com