By Karis Regamey
Today is June 8. Now, in my world, June 8 is just a normal day. There is no great significance, no special events, it’s just another day - in this case, a Monday. So why am I writing about June 8? To be very honest, I had nothing else to write about!
So I decided to Google June 8, just for the fun of it. Although June 8 does not seem to be a noteworthy day, the day has significance in history. Wikipedia sites a long list of events that took place on June 8.
Here are just a few:
- 1042 – Edward the Confessor becomes King of England, one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England.
- 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Trois-Rivières – American attackers are driven back at Trois-Rivières, Quebec.
- 1783 – Laki, a volcano in Iceland, begins an eight-month eruption which kills over 9,000 people and starts a seven-year famine.
- 1789 – James Madison introduces twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in the House of Representatives; by 1791, ten of them are ratified by the state legislatures and become the Bill of Rights; another is eventually ratified in 1992 to become the 27th Amendment.
- 1906 – Theodore Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value.
- 1928 – Second Northern Expedition: The National Revolutionary Army captures Peking, whose name is changed to Beijing ("Northern Capital").
- 1953 – An F5 tornado hits Beecher, Michigan, killing 116, injuring 844, and destroying 340 homes.
- 1953 – The United States Supreme Court rules that restaurants in Washington, D.C., cannot refuse to serve black patrons.
- 1959 – The USS Barbero and United States Postal Service attempt the delivery of mail via Missile Mail.
- 1968 – Robert F. Kennedy's funeral takes place at the St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
- 2007 – Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, is hit by the State's worst storms and flooding in 30 years resulting in the death of nine people and the grounding of a trade ship, the MV Pasha Bulker.
This is just a sampling of the events that have taken place on this date throughout history. To see a complete list, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_8.
One item on the list that stood out to me was that on June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Nineteen Eighty-Four was a novel that I was required to read for English class in high school. If you aren’t familiar with the book, Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, primarily in the city of Airstrip One (formerly Great Britain) where there is constant government surveillance. The land is controlled by the Inner Party, Big Brother being the party’s leader, who are solely interested in seeking power. Posters of the party leader with captions “Big Brother is Watching You” dominated the city.
The population is broken into three hierarchies: The Inner Party (upper class making up about 2% of the population), the Outer party (middle class making up about 13% of the population) and the Proles (lower class- the remaining 85% of the population). The Party controls the population with four ministries: The Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Plenty, the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love.
The story follows the protagonist, Winston Smith who is a member of the Outer Party and works for the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite past newspaper articles so that the historical record always supports the party line. Winston secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebelling against Big Brother. The story follows Winston through his rebellion and the government’s punishment when he is eventually caught.
By 1989, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been translated into sixty-five languages, more than any other novel in English at the time. In 2005, Nineteen Eighty-Four was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced by World War II. Orwell believed that British Democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war. He later admitted that he had been wrong. Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay entitled “Why I Write” that “Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders” (Source: Wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four).
June 8, 2015 may just seem like another, ordinary, non-spectacular day in my world, but it sure is significant and has been significant to many people throughout the years. Who knows what today’s five o’clock news will report. All I can say is I sure am glad that our world today is not as George Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four which was published on this day 66 years ago!
Karis Regamey is the Marketing Consultant for Lang Pioneer Village Museum, She has been with the Museum since February of 2009. When she is not busy overseeing the advertising of the Village, she can be found chasing after her two little ones.