Look, folks! We just blogged this month on the subject of Creative Piracy, and now here we have International Data Privacy Day. Let's face it, personal identifying data is in as much danger on the Internet as is creative production, is it not? Hence the proliferation of identity theft.
I found these articles while reading a new article on protecting ourselves from privacy violations on the ubiquitous Facebook. Check these out and ponder:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/privacy_facebook_and_the_future_of_the_inte...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/01/privacyday.php

http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/01/never-mind-valley-beijing.php
 

Howard Zinn, the historian who authored A People's History of the United States, is dead at his home at age 87. Mr. Zinn did not just research and recount history; he lived it. I recommend reading some of the news articles on him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/us/28zinn.html?em
 

Yesterday marked the 65th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland.

Please join me in a (belated) moment of silence as we remember those who died, and those who, incredibly survived. Some survivors are still alive, memories intact.

http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Death-Camp-Survivors-Mark-Auschwitz-...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/opinion/29pisar.html?ref=global-home


 

At age 91, reclusive for the past 50 years, seminal author J. D. Salinger is dead. Author of the book that encapsulated a generation in the 1950's, Catcher in the Rye, and of ̶0;Franny and Zooey," “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” and "Nine Stories," Salinger changed a generation's literature, then virtually "disappeared from sight," eschewing fame.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-salinger29-2010jan29,0,578438.story

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html?ref=todayspaper

Photo Credits:
Evening Standard/Getty Images/NYTimes
 

Author Robert B. Parker, of the prolific Spenser detective series and many other novels, is deceased, on Edgar Allan Poe's birthdate. Mr. Parker was born in 1932.
Another writer on the Night Shift. RIP Robert B. Parker.


 

Author Robert B. Parker, of the prolific Spenser detective series and many other novels, is deceased, on Edgar Allan Poe's birthdate. Mr. Parker was born in 1932.
Another writer on the Night Shift. RIP Robert B. Parker.


 

A new book has just been published, by C. S. Manegold, Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. I'm learning some amazing-and extremely dismaying-historical information from reading some excerpts by the author.

In 1638, black slaves were for sale in Massachusetts Colony. In 1641, Founder Matthew Winthrop-a Christian, a Puritan, and author of the sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," wrote the first law in the Colonies permitting slavery of Africans and indigenous Americans. By the end of the 17th century upwards of 1200 indigenous Americans had been enslaved, and no accurate historical data exists to count the enslaved Africans.

This is a book I am impelled to search out and read.




"Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North," (Princeton University Press, January 20, 2010)

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/01/18/ten-hill-farms-letter-from-antigua/
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/01/19/ten-hill-farms-part-2/
 

Today is Edgar Allan Poe's birthday. "Darling Eddie," as his mother-in-law Maria Clemm referred to him, would now be 201. For 50 years or more, between midnight and 5:30 am, Eastern Standard Time, someone has left a red rose on Poe's grave in Baltimore, Maryland. Not this year! One wonders whether the mysterious one is now residing in his-or her-own grave.

Links:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-naw-poe-grave20-2010jan20,0,38...

http://www.eapoe.org/balt/poegrave.htm

Seems Jan. 2010, despite being a New Year AND a new decade, is marking the end of more than one era. Last Tuesday night, Jan. 11, Teddy Pendergrass passed away, my musical idol; today no mysterious visitor at Poe's grave after 50 years, and Eddie is my literary idol.

 

         I posted this AM that I would blog on her death date (91 years ago today). After more than three hours of immediate research, in addition to the research already done for the novel I wish to write about her, I find: I know nothing! Well, not strictly accurate-but this woman is so complex!! Like another of my historical icons, Victoria Woodhull, Rosa is multilayered. Each time I learn a fact, I uncover tons more questions.


         Rosa Luxemburg was by birth a Polish Jew, by inclination a Socialist, a Marxian, and a political theorist. The Party she founded later became the Communist Party, but I think it a misnomer to call Rosa a Communist. She advocated workers' revolution, yet she was a pacifist.

         Rosa was an originator of the “think globally” attitude, and decried nationalist beliefs and independence in favor of internationalism, rather startling considering her dates are 1871-1919.

         Rosa acquired a doctorate in law and political economy. She taught for seven years at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin. She wrote two nonfiction books, one in prison under a pseudonym. She married to achieve German citizenship. She was imprisoned in Warsaw for her political beliefs. She diverged from Lenin, and was startled to discover that the world Socialist Revolution did not catch fire in Germany as she had expected, but in Russia.

         Rosa believed in mass workers' rebellion as the source of the Socialist achievement. This proved to be her downfall. She and Karl Liebknecht founded the Spartacist League, whose workers' rebellion of Jan. 12-19, 1919, was ended by the right-wing paramilitary. Rosa and Karl were taken to the Berlin Hotel Eden where they were interrogated and then executed. Karl's corpse was taken to the morgue. Rosa's was tossed into the Landwehr canal, where it remained-allegedly-for four months before recovery (June 1, 1919) following the spring thaw.

         The uprising for which Karl and Rosa were executed by the Freikorps (right-wing militias comprised of German WWI veterans, defending the Weimar Republic) had been ordered by Karl without Rosa's knowledge. When she learned of it, she considered it a blunder, but then lent it her support anyway, support that led to her interrogation and execution. Her corpse was treated with so much less respect than Karl's, tossed into a frozen canal. The body recovered later might not even have been hers, and the grave with her tombstone was violated by Nazis in 1935-bulldozed- and the remains disappeared. Possibly her skeleton was the one discovered in 2009 in the basement of a Berlin hospital.

There is at least one film and several biographies of this extraordinarily complex woman. I highly recommend Jonathan Rabb's 2005 novel Rosa.

Contact me if you'd like to examine the links I used in researching this entry.


 

If Martin Luther King Jr. had not been cut down in the prime of his life in 1968 by an assassin's bullet, today he would be 81 years old. Please let us all observe a moment of silence, and remember and honour the work that Rev. King did for society, for people of colour, and for human rights.

Today some of us also commemmorate the death of Rosa Luxemburg, executed by fascists on January 15, 1919, in Berlin, for her part in inciting a workers' rebellion about which she had no prior information nor did she act to incite it.

I will be adding more on Rosa today, as I do additional pertinent research. I am in the process of researching for a straight-historical novel on her life, but I highly recommend Jonathan Rabb's novel, ROSA.