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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
On 9 January 1987, at the beginning of the Battle of Shalamcheh, in the midst of the Iran–Iraq War, the Iranian Behbehan Battalion came under a heavy aerial chemical bomb attack by Iraqi forces. The Behbahan Battalion was positioned near Shalamcheh, in the south of Iran, about 10 km from the port of Khorramshahr. The battalion was waiting for orders to be deployed to the front line when they were attacked. The Fadjr Battalion soldiers, numbering around 300, took refuge in an open-air shelter on the side of the road. The mustard gas bombs were dropped both on the road as well as on the sides of the road close to where the soldiers took shelter, and the resulting debris greatly affected them. Soon, a thick layer of poisonous smoke covered the whole area. Due to the high volume of mustard gas that the bombs contained, many soldiers were poisoned, some losing their lives in the few hours after the attacks. Other soldiers were evacuated to field hospitals in Ahwaz and to medical centers in Tehran. Some of those who were not initially wounded stayed behind in the contaminated area of the battlefield to help get the wounded out. From the over 300 soldiers present at the time of the attack, 90 lost their lives as a result of the chemical bombs within a few days. This is one of the highest mortality levels of mustard gas bombs known to date. The surviving veterans have suffered from a variety of illnesses due to exposure to mustard gas, some having lost their lives in recent years due to complications. The most recent veteran to lose his life due to exposure to mustard gas at Behbahan was Enaytollah Nasseri, who died in late 2009 in a hospital in Tehran, suffering from a collapsed lung. In addition to the soldiers of the Fajr Battalion, soldiers from nearby battalions–including Fath Platoon–were also affected by the use of chemical bombs. On each anniversary of this attack, surviving veterans, families of the dead soldiers, and other veterans from the Iran-Iraq War join the people of Behbahan to commemorate the victims and celebrate the lost lives of their loved ones. The annual ceremony takes place every January at the location where the gas attack took place, with thousands of people attending the ceremony each year. In 2009 a delegation from Hiroshima attended the ceremony and paid tribute to the victims of the gas attack. In January 2012, more than 4,000 people including war veterans and their families attended the memorial ceremony.
ʿAbdullāh ibn Ṣāliḥ al-Samāhījī (Arabic: عبد الله بن صالح السماهيجي; 1675–1722) was a Bahraini Shia Islamic scholar who lived during the Safavid period. He was born in the village of Samaheej on Muharraq Island, and like many of his Bahraini contemporaries, he was a follower of the Akhbari theological school—although his father was a pure Usuli who detested Akhbaris. Among his teachers was Sulaymān ibn ʿAbdullāh al Maḥūdhī. After the 1717 Omani invasion of Bahrain, as Samāhijī fled to Isfahan where he briefly served as the Sheikh ul-Islam. He then settled in Behbehan where he died in 1722. Among his works is Munyat al Mumārisīn in Arabic, which includes an examination of the Akhbari-Usuli dispute.
The 2019–2020 Iranian protests, sometimes known by the protesters as Bloody November or (using the Iranian calendar) Bloody Aban (Persian: آبان خونین), were a series of nationwide civil protests in Iran that took place in 2019 and 2020. Initially caused by a 50–200% increase in fuel prices, they occurred as part of the wider Iranian Democracy Movement, leading to calls for the overthrow of the government in Iran and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The protests commenced as peaceful gatherings on the evening of 15 November but spread to 21 cities within hours, as videos of the protest circulated online, eventually becoming the most violent and severe anti-government unrest since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. To block the sharing of information regarding the protests and the deaths of hundreds of protesters on social media platforms, the government shut down the Internet nationwide, resulting in a near-total internet blackout of around six days. In an effort to crush the protests, the Iranian government (according to Amnesty International) shot protesters dead from rooftops, helicopters, and at close range with machine gun fire. In an effort to mask the scale and casualty count of the protests, it hauled away large numbers of bodies of the dead protesters, and threatened families of slain protesters not to speak to the media or hold funerals. As many as 2,000 Iranian protesters were killed. The government crackdown and protests resulted in the destruction of 731 government banks including Iran's central bank, nine Islamic religious centres, protesters tearing down anti-American billboards, and posters and statues of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as well as former leader Ruhollah Khomeini. Fifty government military bases were also attacked by protesters. The Iranian regime also employed a week long nationwide internet shutdown becoming the longest total Internet shutdown in a large country. It was also the first blackout that effectively isolated a whole nation. The uprising, as well as the wider Iranian Democracy Movement in general, differed from earlier protests in 2009 in not being limited to students and large cities, and in the speed, severity and higher death toll of the government crackdown, which crushed the uprising in three days, although protests flared up periodically in the months after.
The Iran–Iraq War, also called the First Imposed War, Eight-Year War, or Sacred Defense by Iran, began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980. After eight years of conflict, both countries accepted a ceasefire deal brokered by the United Nations, which became effective in August 1988. The war caused around 500,000 deaths (excluding numbers from the related Anfal campaign), making it the deadliest conventional war ever fought between regular armies of developing countries. In starting the war, the Iraqi government—led by President Saddam Hussein—primarily wanted to prevent Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's leader following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, from exporting Iran's new state ideology to Iraq. Iraq also feared that Iran, being a theocratic state mostly composed of Shia Muslims, would rally Iraq's Shia majority against the Sunni Muslim-controlled Baʽathist government. Iraq also wished to replace Iran as the main national power in the Persian Gulf. The war followed a long-running history of border disputes between the two states, as a result of which Iraq planned to retake the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab river that it had ceded to Iran in the 1975 Algiers Agreement. The conflict involved large-scale trench warfare, and deliberate attacks on civilians, including Iraqi chemical attacks. At the start of the war, Iraq expected a decisive victory, considering Iran's post-revolutionary chaos, but their invasion had stalled by December 1980. The Iranian military then gained momentum, and recaptured all their territory by June 1982. Having pushed Iraqi forces back to the pre-war borders, Iran launched an invasion of Iraq, which created a five-year offensive. In mid-1988, Iraq launched a series of counter-offensives that created the military stalemate present at the war's end. Iraq was aided by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and most Arab countries. Iran was aided by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Syria, Libya, North Korea, China, South Yemen, Pakistan, Cuba, and Israel. Meanwhile, Iraqi support for Arab separatists in Iran increased. After years of military and economic losses, decreasing morale, intensifying Iran–U.S. relations, and little international action against Iraqi attacks on Iranian civilians, Iran agreed to a ceasefire with Iraq under United Nations Security Council Resolution 598. The war did not create any permanent border changes, and neither country received war reparations afterwards. Both sides suffered financially. They continued engaging in low-level military conflict until relations improved following Saddam's overthrow in 2003.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker