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On this date in 1689, German poet and mystic Quirinus Kuhlmann was roasted in Moscow for heresy. This Silesian millenarian (English Wikipedia entry | German) experienced a mystical conversion and spent his law school hours instead scribbling visionary poetry and devouring visionary texts. Inflamed with Bohmian fire, I read Bohme with fiery eagerness and capacity. I did not know the Bohmian texts and I knew them the same day. What an admiration (o Jesus!) overcame me when I heard Bohme tell his revelations which I had learned from the universe of nature, with God as my teacher, it were the...

....On this date in 1904, von Trotha did a little of that executing bit, further to doing a whole lot of genocide. It was the very day after von Trotha’s Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order, against the Herero people. We give the narrative here to Jan-Bart Gewald’s “Colonization, Genocide and Resurgence: The Herero of Namibia 1890-1933”, from a collection of papers at a German symposium. Gewald’s complete text is available in scanned pdf form here.....Pocketed by the desert and the German patrols the Herero chiefs and their followers congregated along the Eiseb river. Around the first of October 1904, General Lothar...

It was on this date in 1864* that an infamous Union war crime took place in Front Royal, Virginia. Union forces in the Old Dominion were bedeviled by John Singleton Mosby, whose bold and legendary guerrilla tactics are commemorated in Herman Melville’s “The Scout Toward Aldie”: All spake of him, but few had seen Except the maimed ones or the low; Yet rumor made him every thing– A farmer–woodman–refugee– The man who crossed the field but now; A spell about his life did cling — Who to the ground shall Mosby bring? In 1864, the “Gray Ghost” haunted the Shenandoah...

On this date in 1630,* the Ming statesman Yuan Chonghuan was executed by lingchi. Yuan (English Wikipedia entry | Chinese was a commander during the 1620s wars against invaders from Manchuria — wars that in due course would bring about the end of the Ming dynasty and the transition to the Manchu-founded Qing. For that very reason, Yuan cuts a sort of Stilicho figure, whose historical shadow is that of a capable commander undone due to petty infighting by a state too far gone to rot to recognize that it needed his talents.** Yuan scored some notable battlefield wins against...

On this date in 1870, a spy of the Franco-Prussian War was shot in Paris. Barely a month old at this point, the Franco-Prussian War was a fast-unfolding fiasco for the Franco side. For three weeks, French reverses as the Prussians pressed through the frontier had been the talk of the capital. The action at this moment was the huge Prussian siege of Metz, for whose relief the French emperor Napoleon III — Marx’s original “first as tragedy, then as farce” guy — was even then mobilizing a relief force. Napoleon was ridiculously out in the field, personally “leading” the...

In August 897 or so, the deposed Pope Stephen VII (or VI*) was executed (or just murdered) in prison by strangulation. Details, you see, are thin on the ground here in the so-called Dark Ages. Rome has come down a bit in the world.... While the popes of the 10th century would really set that prostituted standard with the period known as the “pornocracy”, Stephen VI(I) makes everybody’s bad popes lists with one of the papacy’s all-time embarrassing events: the Cadaver Synod. The pontiff at this point is no global media celebrity but an ensemble character captive to the the...

This date is the 550th anniversary of (in)famous Wallachian dictator/vampire prototype Vlad III Tepes‘s destruction of the town of Amlas, impaling all its surviving citizens. ...And he had frequent recourse to it during his long struggle for power in the treacherous 1450s and 1460s, the period* when Vlad III became famous for the iron-willed cruelty required to exercise power in a Wallachia squeezed between the expanding Ottoman Empire and Hungary. It was this terrifying period from the late 1450s that made Vlad Dracula — the titular second name inherited from his father‘s investment into the Order of the Dragon, Draco...

On this date in 1971, four leftist officers who had briefly overthrown the government of Sudan were shot — just one day after their coup collapsed. This was but a brief and early interruption in what proved to be the 16-year (1969-1985) reign of Col. Gaafar Nimeiry, who himself had taken power at gunpoint two years earlier. Although Nimeiry initially had the support of Sudan’s then-robust Communist Party, the colonel soon clamped down on the staunchest and most pro-Moscow Communists, eventually inviting the attempted coup. The “Siesta Coup” was mounted on the scorching afternoon of July 19 while city traffic...

On this date in 1851, three men were publicly hanged from a scaffold at Fourth and O Street in Sacramento, California: John Thompson* and James Gibson legally, and William Robinson under color of lynch law. According to Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, all three had been condemned to death under the brand-new state‘s brand-new Criminal Practices Act, making theft a capital offense. They had assaulted and robbed a guy on the streets of Sacramento a few weeks previous, and the local vigilance committee had already made plain its impatience with the matter: upon the granting of a legal...

On this date in the pregnant year of 1789, the former boulevard actor Francois Bordier hanged for a bit of revolutionary overexuberance. He’d gained his fame in the 1780s for his portrayals of both Harlequin (on stage) and a besotted gambler (in Parisian society); “police records bulge with accounts of his gambling debts and spats with actresses.” The summer of 1789, after the Bastille was stormed in Paris, was in the countryside la Grande Peur, the Great Fear: bread shortages and political upheaval put many a manor to the sack. One such facility was Rouen’s Hotel de l’Intendance, assailed on...

The U.S. state of Oregon has the death penalty on the books, but hasn’t employed it on a non-consenting prisoner since August 20, 1962. That was the date that former logger LeRoy Sanford McGahuey, with a shrug of his broad shoulders and the sanguine parting observation “That’s it,” paid in the gas chamber for the 1961 hammer slayings of his girlfriend and her son.* (He’s also the last of seventeen people executed by lethal gas in Oregon history.) The late Oregon political lion Mark Hatfield, who was governor at the time, permitted the execution to go ahead despite misgivings about...