Today -100: November 9, 1917: Now we have a revolution

The Bolsheviks seize the Winter Palace. It’s all pretty bloodless so far. The Petrograd Soviet promises an immediate “democratic peace” and the redistribution of land. The military death penalty is re-abolished. “Now we have a revolution,” Lenin says, “The peasants and workers control the government. This is only a preliminary step toward a similar revolution everywhere.” But does this mean anything outside Petrograd? Will the rest of the country and the military follow? Will Kerensky (currently nowhere to be found) establish a competing government in Moscow?

Headline of the Day -100: 

This is the Balfour Declaration. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour writes to Lord Walter Rothschild to pass on to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland that the UK now supports “a national home for the Jewish people” “in Palestine.” Which is all quite vague, and intentionally so. A home doesn’t necessarily mean a state, and “in Palestine” doesn’t necessarily mean all of Palestine. Balfour says this shouldn’t “prejudice the civil or religious rights” of non-Jews in Palestine.

Hunger-striking suffragist prisoners Alice Paul and Rose Winslow are forcibly fed.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a black soldier from the Ohio National Guard brushes against a white woman on a crowded street car. For this infraction, he is kidnapped by a bunch of white men and taken away in a car towards an unknown fate. More soldiers from his battalion (so also black) rush off in pursuit in carjacked automobiles, and....  the NYT never runs a follow-up, so who knows.

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