This is over in the thread that just popped up about Andy Kaufman, but it could be here, too…
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Of the roughly 162,000 convicts sent here from 1788 to 1868, there were at least 3,600 political prisoners including trade unionists, democracy advocates and Irish revolutionaries.
And far from abandoning their politics when they arrived, these people — along with many others — banded together to bring political resistance to the colonies.
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In 1522 or 1523, he moved to the newly founded mining town of Annaberg where he spent the rest of his life. There he finished work on the manuscript of his algebra textbook, Coß, in 1524, although the book was not published until 1992 by B.G. Teubner.
The algebra textbook is named after the common name for the unknown variable in the German Middle Ages, and it establishes the connection between medieval and modern algebra.
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Coverage of the musical “Suffs,” about the history of suffragists and their movement in the US. This report includes the women producing the show as well as their views about the ongoing struggle for women’s rights:
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Oscar Wilde Bothered and Bewildered Westerners While Touring to Promote Gilbert & Sullivan
This is the first account about Wilde’s tour I have read - a tour I knew about from reading Walter Satterthwait’s
sometime in the late 1990ies. I think I liked it.
The book takes Wilde’s tour as the starting point of a story where Wilde meets Doc Holliday and hunts down a serial killer modelled after Jack the Ripper. Pretty wild, but enthralling, witty, and funny.
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Enough about Oscar, how was the book?
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Kas-im Reed? 
Left out is the expansion of GSU into that part of downtown, me thinks.
[ETA] He mentions The Gulch, which is getting redeveloped… our local public radio has stories on it:
Including this one on the history of the Gulch…
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Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago today… 
Unplugged is probably the best thing they ever did…
If you can get your hands on the uncut version that’s on DVD, I highly recommended. When MTV aired it, they cut out a lot of really tense moments between Cobain and the meatheads in the audience.
I did a search on the news, and there were certainly some exploitative seeming articles about his death (including one from a month ago that a screen-shot and put in the fuck today thread). But here is a couple of articles about his life, death, and legacy…
This one is okay, revisiting a photo shoot of Cobain’s family, which the guy who took them is promoting his book, but the photos are really sweet…
And here is some of reprints of Billboard’s coverage:
Shit… had forgotten that there was a gap between when he died and when he was found…
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Strikes me that I should add a note about if you’re feeling suicidal, you can get help… here are the lines for the US and UK, so if someone has another relavant link to add, please do so in reply to me here.
https://www.spuk.org.uk/national-suicide-prevention-helpline-uk/
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[How Captain James Cook Got Away with Murder | The New Yorker]
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Women who inspired Rosie the Riveter discuss their history and Congressional Gold Medal:
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This is about two things:
Philip’s complicated family history (going back all the way to 1840) and his naval career.
Both very interesting.
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Good, compact rundown of what the Ghost Army was, how it came into being and what they did.
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“Moreover, Ghost Army personnel would frequent local French cafes, bars, and brothels in order to spin false stories for spies and collaborators to overhear.”
“What did you do in the war, Daddy?” 
Another case of wartime deception is told in the book The Man Who Never Was, later the movie Operation Mincemeat.
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The current film is more or less (rather less, if you ask me) based on Ben Macintyre’s excellent book on Operation Mincemeat. Macintyre also wrote several books on contemporary operations like double cross etc., highly recommended.
The 1953 book The Man that Never Was is the bowdlerised version of what happened that the man behind Mincemeat, Ewen Montagu, was permitted to publish. Permitted by Whitehall (and possibly even higher up); apparently as a way of preempting “The Cousins” spilling the beans and taking too much credit.
The 1956 film based on the 1953 book stars Clifton Webb as Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu - and Ewen Montagu himself as an Air Vice Marshal (uncredited).
Yet another interesting figure is Montagu’s brother younger Ivor, accomplished film maker, promoter of table tennis and, as it turned out, Soviet spy.
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A theory from Rasputina…
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