Today in history

(Sources: Peace Buttons, War Resisters League, and the Peace Center.)

July 7

1863
First military draft by US (exemptions cost $100).

1903
Labor organizer Mary Harris (“Mother”) Jones led the “March of the Mill Children” over 100 miles from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week. It is during this march, on about the 24th, she delivered her famed “The Wail of the Children” speech. Roosevelt refused to see them.

“Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.”
from Mother Jones’s autobiography

1957
Scientists held their first peace conference in the village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. The mission of the Pugwash conference was to “… bring scientific insight and reason to bear on threats to human security arising from science and technology in general, and above all from the catastrophic threat posed to humanity by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction….”

1977

The United States conducted its first test of the neutron bomb. The neutron bomb was a tactical thermonuclear weapon designed to cause very little physical damage through limited blast and heat but was designed to kill troops through localized but intense levels of lethal radiation. a neutron bomb explosion at a test site

1979
2,000 American Indian activists and anti-nuclear demonstrators marched through the Black Hills of western South Dakota to protest the development of uranium mines on native sacred lands.

1988

The first of many syringes, blood vials & other hospital souvenirs — some contaminated with the AIDS virus — washes ashore on Long Island, forcing the closing of miles of beaches in the midst of the worst East Coast heat wave of the decade.