Learn about progressive, intersectional milestones in history, with MainStream MultiMedia’s This Day in History.
1926: A. A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh, a collection of children’s stories about a talking teddy bear that has now been translated into 50 languages.
1943: In the Sobibor Uprising, 600 Jewish prisoners rise up against Nazi captors in the Sobibor killing center in Poland, where an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Of those who escaped, 200 were killed or recaptured and only about 50 survived long-term.
1964: Martin Luther King, Jr., 35, becomes the youngest man ever to receive a Nobel Prize for Peace. He was honored for his nonviolent efforts to fight racial inequality and donated his $54,600 prize money to civil rights efforts.
1977: Des Moines was the site of a notorious moment in LGBTQ+ history: homophobe Anita Bryant’s pie in the face. Activist and freelance writer Thom Higgins threw the pie during a press conference by Bryant, a singer, Christian activist, and former beauty queen. Bryant was in town for a concert and to continue an anti-gay activist career that included helping to defeat a gay rights ordinance in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.
1979: The first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights draws over 100,000 protestors. Goals of the march: a lesbian/gay rights bill, an executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, the repeal of all anti-lesbian/gay laws, ending discrimination in LGBTQ+ parent custody cases; and protecting LGBTQ+ youth from “any laws which are used to discriminate against, oppose and/or harass them in their homes, schools, jobs and social environments.”
1982: President Ronald Reagan revives the “war on drugs” first declared by Richard Nixon in 1971, proclaiming drug abuse a national security threat and amping up funding of drug prosecutions.
1994: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres receive a joint Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accord, a secret agreement reached a year earlier that was to recognize a Palestinian state and end decades of violence between the two countries. Protests and violence erupted within a day of the award, and Rabin was assassinated two years later.
2015: Bernie Sanders becomes the first major party Presidential candidate to openly express support for cannabis legalization.
2017: Miramax film executive Harvey Weinstein, facing growing accusations of raping and assaulting actresses, is expelled by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Weinstein was eventually accused of rape, assualt or harassment by more than 100 women, convicted of several, and is expected to serve the rest of his life in prison.
(Anita Bryant in the 1970s, courtesy Florida Memory Project; Martin Luther King Jr. pre-1968, courtesy WikiMedia Commons; 1979 march buttons courtesy National Museum of American History)
