Seeds of Fire: A People’s Chronology
Recalling events that happened on this day in history.
Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.
Compiled by Ulli Diemer
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August 4, 1701
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The signing of the Great Peace at Montreal. Forty aboriginal nations sign a peace treaty with New France.
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August 4, 1792
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Birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley, English romantic poet and political radical (1792-1822).
Shelley’s poem Masque of Anarchy, written after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 (see August 16) calls for non-violent but determined resistance against governments that attempt to suppress freedom. Henry David Thoreau refers to its message in his essay Civil Disobedence, and Gandhi often quotes from it when he speaks at mass rallies during the campaign for Indian independence:
Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words, that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free!
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Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many – they are few
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August 4, 1912
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Birth of Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish humanitarian who worked to rescue Jews from the Holocaust.
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August 4, 1914
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Betraying everything that it had said it stood for, the German Social Democratic Party votes for war credits. On the same day the French and Belgian Socialist parties also issue decrees declaring support of their own governments in the war that broke out on August 1.
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August 4, 1964
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The ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’, a fabricated ‘attack’ on a U.S. ship by supposed Vietnamese torpedo boats. The U.S. government uses the invented ‘incident’ to push a resolution through Congress allowing the President to intervene in any southeast Asian country he ‘believes’ is threatened by communism. Years later, it is revealed that the alleged attack never happened.
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